WOODFORD COUNTY, Ky. (LEX 18) — Lt. Gov. Jacqueline Coleman made a special stop on Wednesday to support Woodford County officially becoming a "Recovery Ready Community."
"It's truly a celebration to be able to celebrate Woodford County as a Recovery Ready Community," said Coleman as she gave remarks.
There's a whole checklist of requirements community leaders had to take to get to this point. It included a host of meetings with various groups of different community stakeholders in the recovery space so that they could pool together the county's resources into one document.
"We really wanted to use it as a scorecard as a benchmark. We think today is the starting line, not the finish line. So we know that we have a lot of work to do, but we wanted to gather and rally the troops to see what all we had to make connections and then to help further that mission, " said Emily Downey, President and CEO of the Woodford County Chamber of Commerce. "So a lot of these folks in the room have put in a lot of hours. We met at the police department in the community room many times."
The county applied for the certificate, which means they have met the state's official standard for quality substance abuse prevention, treatment, and long-term recovery. Coleman said they are just the third county out of more than a hundred to do so.
Health Director Cassie Prather said it's motivation to continue the work together and to expand to help more people.
"It takes everyone. It's a multi-sector type of initiative, and that's what you have in Woodford County," said Prather.
Implemented after the passage of House Bill 7 in 2022, The Recovery Ready Communities Certification Program is designed to provide a quality measure of a city or county's substance use disorder (SUD) recovery efforts.
The bill created the Advisory Council for Recovery Ready Communities within the Office of Drug Control Policy (ODCP).
