This story by Aaron Calvin was first published by the News & Citizen on June 6.
Five years after founding Jenna’s Promise, Greg Tatro is stepping down as president and board chair of the holistic opioid addiction treatment organization.
He will remain on the board while his wife, Dawn Tatro, steps down from the board to take on a volunteer role in the organization named after the couple’s daughter, who died from an opioid-related overdose in 2019.
Taking over the leadership role will be current board members Kitty Toll, a former Democratic representative in Montpelier, and Lamoille County sheriff Roger Marcoux. They will take over as chair and vice-chair, respectively.
Additional members joining the board include attorney Christina Nolan, who ran an unsuccessful campaign for U.S. Senate in 2022, retired judge Phyllis Phillips and Laraway School executive David McAllister.
Amy Tatro will remain on the board. Gregory Tatro, the organization’s communications head, will now serve alongside current CEO Daniel Franklin. The interim co-directors will begin a search for a new executive to lead the nonprofit.
This executive-level reorganization signals a new phase for the center, which has expanded quickly in a half-decade and endured the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic and devastating flooding that wreaked havoc on its infrastructure last summer. As it matures, Jenna’s Promise will shift from family-led to family-supported.
“We’ve gone from this startup phase to this vision of being something that can be a juggernaut — not in size, but in importance and power — to direct the conversation,” Gregory Tatro said. “We’ve made a lot of strides toward this, and with our new board leadership, the changes we’ve been making internally, Jenna’s Promise does feel like a changing organization. From the ashes of the flood, we’ve risen again, in this new form that’s better than before”
On its face, the organization seemed to rebuild quickly from the flood caused by days of intense rain last July. Having filled out several vacant buildings in the village of Johnson with its network of businesses and recovery residences over the past five years, Jenna’s Promise likely suffered the most out of any single entity outside of the town and village municipal governments.
The Johnson Health Clinic, nearly inundated by water, along with the Rae of Hope recovery residence on the banks of the Gihon River and the Jenna’s Promise Cafe, which took on some water in its basement, were all back in operation by the end of 2023.
Below the surface of the optimism and determination of this comeback was a battered organization.
Tatro described splitting employees between those dedicated to furthering the Jenna’s Promise mission and those working to bring back what had been lost. The flood traumatized both employees and those they were trying to help, leading to widespread turnover from which they’re continuing to recover.
The flood not only directly impacted its businesses but arrested the momentum of the economic vitality Jenna’s Promise hoped to promote in Johnson, which the organization sees as central to its broader mission. A guiding concept of Jenna’s is to not just provide opportunities for employment to people in recovery but to improve material conditions in the entire community.
“One of our goals was to bring opportunity to this town and to unite the town to bring people from the university down to the village, to sort of bring the business and the nonprofit and the health community together, to be united as a community,” Franklin said. “It felt like the flood popped our balloon, and we’re still making our way back from that.”
Recovery expansion
Despite being waylaid by the flood, the political clout of Jenna’s Promise continues to grow.
This has been most clearly evinced by a $241,000 grant awarded to the organization by the Department of Corrections to work with women at the Chittenden Correctional Facility in South Burlington and other prisons transition out of the criminal-justice system.
Franklin called this a sea change within the Department of Corrections toward potentially less punitive and more cost-effective forms of addressing the cycle of incarceration for repeat offenders, many of whom also struggle with addiction.
“This is a really positive step in the right direction to give opportunities to women who might not otherwise have the opportunity to leave incarceration and go back into communities,” Franklin said. “Jenna’s Promise occupies a relatively niche space that makes us able to serve this population of people who have substance use disorders, people who are often survivors of sexual and domestic violence.”
Franklin has long advocated for recovery programs to be involved in prisons to address a system that often enables addiction and exposure to drugs more than it prevents or stops it.
The partnership between Jenna’s Promise and the Institute for Trauma Recovery and Resilience has made the organization particularly well-suited to addressing addiction as one part of a range of issues rooted in deeper psychological problems.
“Our aim isn’t just to address the symptoms and after effects, but to get to the root of the problems in individual people’s lives, to get into the root traumas that cause someone to, in many cases, end up in incarceration, and to fall into substance use and to do other things to alleviate their misery, their physical health issues or their mental health issues,” according to Franklin.
Jenna’s Promise may only be able to house 17 at a time at the residences in Johnson, and its approach may be more resource-intensive than traditional jailing, but it gets better results than the usual approach, according to Tatro and Franklin, who claim their trauma-based approach has resulted in less recidivism and participants who are more self-supporting at the program’s end.
Franklin also said the ability of Jenna’s Promise to take on this partnership with the state was evidence of the organization’s maturation as its grown from a commendable “recovery village” experiment out of Johnson to proven program.
“There are 137 women incarcerated (Chittenden Correctional Facility) and others around the state, and every one of them is like Jenna (Tatro) and could have gone any number of paths like Jenna, so our motivation to help women like her and other people who had a lot of things go wrong in their lives really couldn’t be any stronger,” Franklin said.
Recovery politics
As it has grown, Jenna’s Promise has also captured national attention.
Gregory Tatro said that Jenna’s Promise had been working closely with the Fletcher Group, which houses and treats people experiencing homelessness and substance abuse disorder in southern Kentucky that has been doing “groundbreaking work,” and North Dakota’s Republican Gov. Doug Burnham is sending a team to learn more about Jenna’s and what elements might be implemented in that state’s addiction recovery programs.
Tatro, whose interest in politics predates the nonprofit’s founding, offered up the fact that he recently spoke with Vermont conservative and perennial office-seeker Gerald Malloy and Rep. Ro Khanna, D-California, in the span of one day as a testament to the organization’s bipartisan approach. He said putting Toll and Marcoux in leadership positions on the board was intentionally meant to put a liberal and conservative “unifier” in charge.
“Both (Khanna and Malloy) are saying the same thing, that this is an amazing program that can change how we talk and look at recovery,” Tatro said. “For us, the conclusion that we’ve come to is that to truly shift the conversation, we have to get changemakers thinking and talking about (addiction and recovery).”
That doesn’t necessarily mean that the organization agrees completely with all its supporters. Well over 200 opioid-related overdose deaths have been recorded each year since 2021 in Vermont, and while the official number may have dipped slightly in 2023, Franklin gently pointed out that the state’s count represents only a fraction of the actual deaths from drug use.
To prevent as many deaths as possible, Franklin and Jenna’s Promise have been committed to harm reduction practices, an approach meant to keep people safe embodied best by the vending machine that provides free naloxone, an overdose prevention drug, set up outside of the Johnson clinic.
“The harm reduction principle is that people can’t change overnight, and you can’t go from using substances to completely sober, so in many ways, our whole model is to create change over time,” Franklin said.
Republican Gov. Phil Scott recently vetoed a bill that would create a safe-injection site — or overdose prevention site, as Franklin called it — in Burlington, a place where illegal drugs could be used under supervision and with help nearby in an overdose hot zone. Franklin has advocated for such sites in the past.
Scott received the first Inspiration Award from Jenna’s Promise at the opening of the Jenna’s House community center in 2021 and has been a vocal supporter of the organization. Tatro argued that such sites are controversial even within the recovery community, and both Franklin and Tatro said the organization tries to avoid taking a stance on such issues.
“If we can all stay united, and all stand shoulder to shoulder — whether we’re left, right or in the middle, pushing toward this better future — that’s how we solve this problem,” Tatro said. “Substance use doesn’t care about your political persuasion, it doesn’t care if you live in a city, or a small town doesn’t care if you’re black or white, older, young or anything in between. The only way to address something that’s so indiscriminate is to do it in a way that’s indiscriminate.”
Read the story on VTDigger here: Jenna’s Promise enters new phase.