Vital Strategies collaborates with people with lived experience, practitioners, and researchers to turn lessons from the field into practical resources that can be used anywhere. The ten toolkits highlighted below reflect this approach: translating evidence into action for a healthier, more compassionate future.
Creating Safe Care: Supporting Pregnant and Parenting Patients Who Use Drugs
Punitive drug laws and threats of family separation discourage pregnant and parenting people who use drugs from seeking prenatal and postpartum care. To help address the health disparities that pregnant and parenting people face, Vital Strategies supported the Camden Coalition to develop “Creating Safe Care: Supporting Pregnant and Parenting Patients Who Use Drugs.” This interactive toolkit serves as a guide for health care workers to support the implementation of evidence-based and family-focused strategies for working with pregnant and parenting people who use drugs. The toolkit includes sample forms, templates, worksheets and assessments for adaptation and use in different health care settings. It aims to make a report to child welfare services a last resort only.
Harm Reduction is Healthcare: Sustainable Funding for Harm Reduction Programs
Harm reduction services remain severely underfunded. Vital Strategies, the National Harm Reduction Coalition and In the Works co-developed the e-course and workbook “Harm Reduction is Healthcare: Sustainable Funding for Harm Reduction Programs.” The toolkit offers guidance to harm reduction programs navigating opportunities to secure healthcare financing, assess opportunities, build meaningful partnerships and establish sustainable funding streams.
The free, six-module e-course identifies an array of funding streams and provides actionable steps for harm reduction programs. In the workbook, harm reduction program implementors will find tools and resources for maximizing healthcare financing opportunities.
Interrupting Punitive Responses to Substance Use and Pregnancy
From 1973 to 2023, there were over 2,000 instances of pregnancy-related prosecutions, with the overwhelming majority of cases involving allegations of substance use. What’s more, overdose has become a leading cause of death during or shortly after pregnancy.
Vital Strategies partnered with legal defense and advocacy organization Pregnancy Justice to create “Interrupting Punitive Responses to Substance Use and Pregnancy,” a resource that aims to transform how the criminal legal system responds to substance use during pregnancy, shifting from punishment toward approaches that are grounded in public health and community well-being.
Intended for criminal legal system practitioners, this toolkit provides strategies that center a public health approach—emphasizing evidence-based solutions, not punitive measures.
A Guide For People Who Use Drugs by People Who Use Drugs About Using Drugs Alone
People who use drugs may choose to use alone for a variety of reasons. A harm reduction approach demands that we respect those reasons, while still seeking ways to help people stay safer. With support from Vital Strategies, the Philadelphia-based harm reduction collective Project SAFE published two guidance resources to promote safety while using drugs alone. “Do You Ever Use Drugs Alone?” is a guide by and for people who use drugs, sharing lessons and strategies about how to be safer when using drugs alone.
Drug Checking Implementation Workbook
Drug checking strategies, which include fentanyl test strips and laboratory testing, are lifesaving interventions that allow people who use drugs to identify unknown adulterants in the criminalized drug supply and make informed decisions about what drugs they consume and how. Vital Strategies collaborated with Remedy Alliance to develop the “Drug Checking Implementation Workbook,” a free online resource that offers step-by-step guidance to harm reduction advocates, administrators, program directors and anyone seeking to start a community-based drug checking service. The toolkit offers useful steps to establishing and operating programs for point-of-care and community-based drug checking services using an infrared spectrometer.
This workbook includes detailed information about conceptualizing drug checking services, incorporating community feedback, purchasing equipment and hiring staff, through the implementation of the service and continuing education.
Survival Strategies While Using Drugs Alone from People Who Use Drugs
This toolkit was created in tandem with the Using Drugs Alone guide for harm reduction and other health service providers, offering strategies to help support people who use drugs alone and suggestions for effective harm reduction and public health messaging on this issue. While neither guide can guarantee safety when using drugs alone, they offer tools and strategies people can use to reduce the risk of overdose, including how to make a safety plan before using substances.
Communities across the United States are beginning to take steps to avoid police involvement in response to someone experiencing a mental health crisis or an overdose, and moving instead to health and service-oriented responses.
Vital Strategies partnered with The Council of State Governments Justice Center to support the creation of “Expanding First Response: A Toolkit for Community Responder Programs.” This toolkit is designed for organizations, coalitions and local governments seeking to design, implement and strengthen first responder programs that focus on a health-based response for drug overdose events. The toolkit provides a detailed guide on how to train staff, conduct effective call triaging and needs assessments, financially sustain programs, and advance legislation to support community responder initiatives.
A New Approach: A Prosecutor’s Guide to Advancing a Public Health Response to Drug Use
Prosecutors can play a key role in ending the mass incarceration of people who use drugs. Vital Strategies partnered with the Institute for Innovation in Prosecution at John Jay College to convene a working group of experts across relevant sectors to inform the development of “A New Approach: A Prosecutor’s Guide to Advancing a Public Health Response to Drug Use.”
This toolkit is useful for line and elected prosecutors, as well as other criminal justice stakeholders interested in a less punitive approach to people who use drugs. The guide provides prosecutors with a set of evidence-based strategies and best practices grounded in harm reduction and racial justice, offering actionable alternatives to traditional prosecution practices through post-conviction.
Mapping the Landscape: The Prescription Drug Abuse Policy System (PDAPS)
The PDAPS platform created and maintained by the Center for Public Health Law Research at Temple University is a resource for understanding state laws on a variety of topics related to drug policy. Visitors can learn about laws across all 50 states relating to syringe access, naloxone, mental health treatment and other key topics.
Vital Strategies supported and worked with the Center to update its dataset on buprenorphine prescribing requirements and limitations across all 50 states. Since passage of the MAT Act in 2023 eliminated federal X-waiver requirements, which mandated physicians undergo additional training prior to being able to prescribe buprenorphine, assessing how states regulate buprenorphine treatment is essential to promoting low-barrier access.
The PDAPS resource addresses questions about each state’s legal landscape such as additional training and licensure requirements, dosage limits, counseling requirements, frequency of required drug testing, decriminalization of buprenorphine possession and other factors that can either inhibit or facilitate access to buprenorphine.
An accompanying policy brief provides an overview of this legal landscape, summarizes key findings of evidence evaluating the impact on treatment access and quality and provides policy and research recommendations moving forward.
Opioid Settlement Funds: State-Level Guides for Community Advocates
Vital Strategies and Christine Minhee of OpioidSettlementTracker.com partnered to provide a comprehensive update and expansion of the opioid settlement guides for all 50 states and the District of Columbia initially released in 2023.
These guides were created as a resource for community organizations, advocates and local stakeholders to understand the decision-making processes that will shape how funds from opioid litigation settlements are spent in their states. For each of the 50 states and for D.C., the guides provide details on the processes established by each state for the use of funds, the officials who are involved in deciding and approving the use of funds, reporting and accountability structures in each state, and how advocates can get involved.
Opioid settlement funds offer a significant opportunity for enhanced investment in evidence-based strategies, such as harm reduction intervention and improved access to buprenorphine and methadone medications for opioid use disorder. Our goal with these guides is to empower community advocates to understand and engage with the settlement planning and spending process, so that states’ use of funds is better informed by community voices.
With support from Vital Strategies, researchers at the People, Place and Health Collective at the Brown University School of Public Health created an online resource, opcinfo.org, to bring up-to-date, evidence-based information about overdose prevention centers to the public.
The comprehensive site features a robust database of more than 150 published research papers with accessible plain language summaries of each, a recorded virtual tour of an overdose prevention center, and a library of photos and videos that media outlets can access for free to share objective and non-stigmatizing images illustrating services for people who use drugs.
Click here to learn more about our overdose prevention resources, including toolkits, publications, and campaigns.