AI-powered social entrepreneurship training and community-opportunities matching platform for women enrolled in drug treatment programs.

美国的阿片类药物危机以惊人的速度增长，其中超过70200人占68%

The Opioid drug crisis in US increases at an alarming rate with 68% of the more than 70,200 drug overdose deaths in 2017 involved an opioid, averaging 130 Americans dying every day from opioid overdose (CDC, 2013). Remarkably, between 1999 and 2010, overdose deaths from prescription painkillers increased more than 400% among women, astonishing 1.7 times higher than that of men; and heroin use among women between 2002 and 2013 increased 100%, 2 times higher than among men (CDC, 2013). There is a call for gender-focused drug abuse interventions (OWH, 2016; NIH, 2018). Adverse social conditions, including economic insecurity, have been identified as risk factors for opioid use among women and reasons for relapse. Addressing addiction problems in conjunction with vocational rehabilitation and, specifically, entrepreneurial skills training has been suggested (SAMHSA, 2000). Furthermore, a good behavioral strategy should include community involvement, as it helps to maintain successful addictive behavioral change (NDCI, 2014). Unfortunately, only a handful of recovery centers offer entrepreneurial skills training and help women to engage in volunteer work or offer them employment opportunities, due to the lack of financial and human resources (SAHMSA, 2000). The objective of this Phase I grant application is to establish technical and commercial feasibility of Gooddler AI-powered, online social entrepreneurship training platform that aims to provide recovery centers with a cost-effective option that will address entrepreneurial skills training and match women with open job or volunteer opportunities at local non-profit organizations. To accomplish this objective, we plan to execute the following specific aims: 1) demonstrate commercial feasibility of Gooddler social entrepreneurship training curriculum with three recovery centers in San Francisco Bay Area; and 2) demonstrate the technical feasibility of Gooddler platform to match women in recovery with appropriate volunteering and/job opportunities at local non-profit organizations. We will establish the technical feasibility by developing community-opportunities matching model that will address the specifications of the Minimum Viable Product (MVP). The commercial feasibility will be demonstrated by helping women to gain skills and knowledge for meaningful engagement (job, volunteering, entrepreneurship). Success will move us closer to our long-term goal of providing drug recovery centers with a tool to help 430,000 women, entering US drug treatment programs every year, to get on the path of productive social involvement in communities of their choice.