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Dear Friends,
This one is a little longer than usual, so hang in with me.
As we close out FY25, I keep thinking about a moment from a few weeks ago. I was visiting one of our Family Success Centers, and a grandmother was packing up art supplies her grandson had used during a workshop. She looked at me and said, almost in passing, “I don’t know what I’d do without this place.”
That stayed with me. It’s one thing to look at data, it’s another to see the relief on someone’s face.
And the data this year is, honestly, staggering.
Last year, we reached just over 28,000 people.
This year, we reached more than 68,000.
I’ve read that number out loud more times than I can count, trying to wrap my head around it. Behind every one of those 68,000 is a story like that grandmother’s. A family trying to stay connected. A teenager working through stress or grief. A person in recovery showing up one more day, and then the next.
Our growth didn’t happen by accident.
It happened because our team keeps pushing forward,
because families keep showing up,
and because this work, prevention, recovery, connection, is needed everywhere.
When prevention is strong and recovery support is easy to find, things shift in real, practical ways:
Parents reunite with their children.
People return to work and begin to rebuild stability.
Students stay anchored to school, to peers, to hope.
Communities become safer and more compassionate.
Despite that, here’s a truth that weighs heavily on all of us:
According to New Jersey’s latest statewide substance use overview, it's estimated that 65% of people who need addiction treatment never receive it.
Think about that for a moment...
the majority of people who are asking for help aren’t able to get it.
For organizations like ours, that gap is enormous.
Even with our growth this year, we know we are still only reaching a fraction of those who could benefit.
Too many people remain caught in cycles of addiction, incarceration, homelessness, and preventable loss, not because they failed, but because the systems around them weren’t designed to catch them in time.
Here's our vision moving forward:
A future where prevention is woven into the everyday fabric of community life.
Where recovery support is something you can find in your neighborhood — not after a crisis, but long before one begins.
Where people in recovery are leading, parenting, contributing, and recognized for their strength, not the stigma they’ve survived.
A future where no one falls through the cracks simply because they ran out of places to turn.
We’ve celebrated big wins this year, bigger than any of us expected. We also know the road ahead is long.
Thank you for standing with us. We will need you in the year ahead.
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