People who use any substance — alcohol, opioids, and more — may contact DART to ask for help. Friends and family can also get in touch with us if they have concerns about a loved one’s substance use. Our partners in health care and law enforcement also make referrals to us when they come in contact with people struggling with substance use and in cases when someone has overdosed.

Team members typically make contact within 12-48 hours. They offer free short- and long-term support and referral to resources. Resources include tools such as Narcan and safe-use planning or short and long term recovery coaching support. People also can be directed to treatment or recovery support services.

DART does collect information about the interactions we have with participants in order to fulfill the data needs of our funders, to help track participant’s goals, and for program evaluation purposes. We have data privacy agreements with partners like hospitals, emergency medical services, and police. Hospitals, EMS, and other health care providers cannot access our data, although they do share data with us. Data shared and accessed by DART’s police partners cannot be used in their law enforcement role.

Although we are providing services that relate to people’s health, we are not a health care provider. The information we gather allows us to keep track of trends in substance use in the area, which helps us respond to the community’s needs in the best ways possible.

Police officers’ work often brings them in contact with people who use substances, and that makes them an important part of DART. But their role on the team is not to make arrests. It’s to help connect people to the help they need. Information gathered by DART is not used for law enforcement purposes. Our outreach teams look slightly different in each community depending on their culture and resources. But they all share the same philosophy of harm reduction and meeting people where they are at.

A harm reduction specialist is a trained counselor who provides outreach and education to injection drug users in a judgment-free and compassionate manner. This may include providing counseling and supplies to promote drug use safety, overdose prevention, naloxone distribution, testing and treatment for health issues, and, when requested, referral to addiction treatment and recovery support.

Recovery coaches are people with lived experience who promote recovery and work with participants to remove barriers and obstacles to recovery, serving as a personal guide and mentor for people seeking or already in recovery from an addiction. DART recovery coaches embrace a harm reduction philosophy.

There’s no cost to individuals for DART services. We don’t bill your insurance company either. All of our work is funded by grants.