Healing Appalachia

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Healing Appalachia

The Mission of Healing Appalachia is to produce events that help connect and grow communities of recovery and healing in Appalachia, raising funds and awareness to combat opioid addiction through a wide array of projects and programs from youth prevention, healthy lifestyles and wellness to recovery houses and recovery to work.  Like Farm Aid does to raise awareness and funds for America’s small, sustainable family farms, we want to bring together folks to raise funds and awareness to celebrate recovery through our main event Healing Appalachia each September and work year-round on more projects fostering communities of recovery. Please join us at the Boyd County Fairgrounds in Ashland, Kentucky, September 19-20, 2025, as we continue with our mission of Healing Appalachia!

The roots of our organization started on August 15, 2016. The small city of Huntington, West Virginia, gained international headlines when 26 people overdosed in one day. This fateful day hammered home the fact that drug overdose is the leading cause of death for people under 50 in the United States. We knew we could not sit on the sidelines while friends and family members succumbed to the evils of opioid addiction. We decided we could impact the world best by starting at home. We gathered kindred spirits and used our musical gifts and love of community to create a non-profit Hope in the Hills, LLC, to produce a yearly concert of connection called: Healing Appalachia.

There is no magic cure for this disease. The causes for this epidemic are complex and not easy to fix as the hardest hit regions such as Appalachia are steeped in poverty. Continued, multiple legal settlements from drug companies to states and local governments verify that pharmaceutical opioid marketing and suspect prescribing practices set the stage for the opioid addiction crisis.

Topic experts like Sam Quinones, author of Dreamland, point to the decline of community by decreased funding of public services. Addiction thrives in isolation, which has exacerbated the crisis during Covid quarantines. In 2021, a record number of 101,000 Americans died of overdoses. Appalachia continues to see more than its weight of the burden with an increasing number of deaths, impact and sorrow. And West Virginia - the only state fully in the Appalachian region - still has the highest rate of fatal overdose in the nation.

As daunting as the crisis has become, hope remains. Robust recovery communities have formed across the United States and Appalachia. Many folks who have been given a second chance on life -- revived with Naloxone and once they travel that hard path to recovery -- are helping others find their way.

Groups are helping at-risk youth and grandfamilies. They are breaking down the stigma of harm reduction. They are providing safe treatment spaces for those in active addiction. They are creating wrap-around services and trainings for recovery to work. They are providing wellness and mental health counseling to first-responders. Through these efforts, communities of recovery across Appalachia are being born, creating a connective tissue of sustainable recovery through personal, innovative and systematic best practices dealing with the catastrophic, multi-generational impact of addiction.