With decades of experience in research, direct services, communications and partnership-building, we are working to transform how our nation addresses addiction. We focus on promoting positive change through three pillars: advancing effective care, changing public policy and changing culture. Advancing Care: To advance care, we help families know what to do to help a loved one, providing them with personalized support and compassionate, lifesaving direct services, and we partner with health care systems and providers to better understand how to treat addiction. We encourage families and health care providers to catch substance use early, before it becomes a problem. Working together, we can lessen the impact of addiction for the next generation and alter the course of this public health crisis. Changing Public Policy: Partnership to End Addiction aims to bring attention to the public health crisis of addiction, educating the country on the need for accessible, quality care that delivers effective treatment to individuals and improves outcomes. We advocate for the policies, practices and resources to effectively prevent substance use and treat addiction. Together with research and the experiences of close to 2,000 parent advocates located in nearly every congressional district across the nation, we help change the narrative and urge all levels of government to take action. Changing Culture: We strive to shift the conversation around addiction by eliminating the stigma that acts as a barrier to important progress. By lifting the voices of those impacted by addiction and sharing their stories, we can extinguish the deep-rooted misperceptions that surround this disease. We can move toward solutions based in science and compassion.

We partner with families, professionals and other organizations to end addiction in this country. Ours is a public health approach, rooted in science and compassion. We mobilize families, policymakers, researchers and health care professionals to more effectively address addiction systemically on a national scale. Partnership to End Addiction provides information to more than 4 million visitors via its website and directly serves more than 10,000 families annually. It offers them personalized support, providing the answers families need particularly in helping teenagers, the life stage when most addiction begins. Nationally, Partnership to End Addiction’s extensive research and communications expertise makes it uniquely qualified to drive systemic change to more effectively mitigate and diminish this disease.

Partnership to End Addiction is a result of the cohesive joining of two pioneering and preeminent addiction-focused organizations — Center on Addiction and Partnership for Drug-Free Kids. We combine our depth of expertise with our compassion-driven, hands-on approach to deliver solutions to individuals and families and proactively take action to incite productive change. Our team of nearly 100 people is a diverse community of researchers, advocates, clinicians, communicators and more, all working together to provide support and solutions for families impacted by addiction.

We measure our progress as an organization by looking at our progress in a number of different areas. In our work to advance effective addiction care, we empower families to care for loved ones, advance the field with expert research, technical assistance and technology innovation and elevate and promote prevention and early intervention strategies. In our work to shape public policy we empower families to advocate for change as well as shape and inform public policy. In our work to change culture, we activate family and parent voices and work to address stigma. We know we are making progress not only by looking at the number of families we serve or the number of policies we change. Equally important to us are the qualitative measures of whether our support helps a parent to have hope that their child will find recovery and the trust that policy makers have in our work.

The Partnership to End Addiction is the result of a merger of Center on Addiction and Partnership for Drug-Free Kids that went into effect in January 2019. Though our legacy organizations were founded in the 1980's, our merged entity is new. In our first year as a new organization we were able to reach more than 5 million people with our web-based resources, support more than 10,000 families through our toll-free helpline and texting platform, mobilize a network of family advocates in 49 states and more than 90 percent of Congressional districts and reach more than 40 million people through our "Stop Opioid Silence" campaign conducted in partnership with Facebook. As we grow as an organization, our goal is to increase the number of families we support as well as the ways in which we support them, build our national network of advocates and partner organizations to create more responsive addiction policy, and advance effective care for substance use disorder through our research and technical assistance.