With the smell of fresh paint still in the air, the C-FORT Recovery Resource Center opened its doors to its first clients this morning.
The center is not a treatment facility, nor does it provide recovery housing. What it does offer is a one-stop shop for resources and services to help those with substance use disorders and their loved ones navigate recovery. Monday through Friday at 707 Executive Place, clients can access local treatment providers, find peer support specialists, recovery groups, syringe exchange services and get the overdose-reversing drug naloxone and training on administering it. Clients can also get tested for STIs and vaccinated for viruses like the flu and Covid-19.
The center is named for the Cumberland-Fayetteville Opioid Response Team, the collaborative between Cumberland County and City of Fayetteville governments and over 100 community partners. Every service available at the center brings the county closer to ending its opioid crisis. Between January and August of this year, there have been 126 visits to Cumberland County’s emergency departments for opioid overdoses, according to overdose data from the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services. This is down from 170 for the same period in 2023.
Establishing a brick-and-mortar space to congregate substance use disorder resources is critical to continuing the downward trend, said Sanquis Graham, local health administrator with Cumberland County’s Department of Public Health. Not only does it help providers connect clients to other services, but Graham said it eliminates one of the biggest barriers to recovery in Cumberland County: transportation.
“Knowing that if we can get them here, they can get all of their needs met in one place, I’m really excited about that,” Graham said. “I think that we’ll have more people who are able to receive services knowing that they don’t have to try to navigate the transportation system.”
The C-FORT Recovery Resource Center opened its doors to its first clients on Oct. 29, 2024. Credit: Morgan Casey / CityView 
Fliers for the various community partners providing services in the county are posted in the lobby of the C-FORT Recovery Resource Center. Credit: Morgan Casey / CityView 
The C-FORT Recovery Resource Center includes a computer room for clients and service providers to use. Credit: Morgan Casey / CityView
The center is near the Fayetteville Area System of Transit’s Route 7 Harris Teeter bus stop. Clients can also use Uber Health to get a free Uber ride to the center by calling the public health department. Besides all the resources in the center, the center shares a parking lot with Cape Fear Valley Health’s Community Mental Health Center.
RI International’s Cumberland Recovery Response Center — a psychiatric emergency room and non-hospital medical detox space, known as The Retreat and Living Room — is also 2.5 miles away.
Graham said the center’s staff expects to see about 80 clients on the busiest days. She anticipates those days likely being Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays when treatment assessment interviews and syringe exchanges are offered. The center’s schedule is still packed on days without those services, with different recovery groups, classes and events throughout the week.
“You can stay as long as you need to — all day even — to get all of those services and all those needs met,” Graham said.
Most of the center’s services are provided by community partners, including Fayetteville’s Comprehensive Treatment Center, North Carolina Harm Reduction and Cape Fear Valley Health. The center also has three full-time, county-employed staff members.
While the 12-step program popularized by Alcoholics Anonymous outlines a formula for recovery, leading health organizations like the Centers for Disease Control and the National Institute on Drug Abuse don’t specify a treatment protocol for recovering from a substance use disorder. The C-FORT Recovery Resource Center’s diverse range of services, including holistic care and a women’s recovery group, is the county and other partners’ effort to provide every resident with what they need on their recovery journey.
“The reality is that there’s multiple pathways for folks and that things that work for one person might not work for another person,” said Gregory Berry, coordinator of C-FORT. “So it’s really important to include multiple pathways and multiple different modalities for people, so that folks have options and that they can pick what works for them. That’s really what we’re trying to do at the Recovery Resource Center.”
Community members, including members of the Cumberland County Board of Commissioners, the public health department and C-FORT developed the center.
“We see firsthand clients who are experiencing substance use disorder and struggling to find their pathway to recovery and not necessarily knowing which route to go,” said Graham. “We just wanted to be able to provide something impactful with the opioid sediment funds that we could see actually pulled together and really create a change and a difference.”
The idea for a central opioid substance use disorder recovery center was officially recommended to the commissioners in August 2022. In February of this year, Jennifer Green, director of the Cumberland County Department of Public Health, requested funding for the C-FORT Recovery Resource Center from the county commissioners.
A little over a week later, the commissioners approved $650,000 from the county’s then-total of $30.7 million in national opioid settlement funding for the center. That pool has since grown to $31.6 million after the county received its share of a settlement between grocery chain Kroger and the states where the retail company or its subsidiaries operate, including North Carolina.
“This Recovery Center is not because of these county commissioners were that smart,” said county commissioners’ Chairperson Glenn Adams at the center’s ribbon-cutting ceremony on Oct. 28. “It’s because of you all in this recovery community who told us what you needed and what you wanted, and we tried to meet that need. Is it the best thing that we’re going to have? Hopefully, no. This is just the beginning.”
The C-FORT Recovery Resource Center will operate under that budget as a pilot program for the next three years. Like all other projects funded by national opioid settlement dollars, center staff must track the center’s impact on clients. The staff will, among other things, track the number of naloxone kits distributed, syringes exchanged and clients linked to care.
Those metrics will be added to the county’s annual impact report, a requirement for all local North Carolina governments that receive national opioid settlement funds. Other county metrics in the report will come from the handful of projects the county commissioners approved to fund with national opioid settlement dollars. Some of those projects include:
- Healing from Within, Cumberland County Detention Center’s Medication for Opioid Use Disorder program that provides treatment inside the detention center
- Recovery housing through Oxford Houses, a statewide network of recovery houses
- Camp Rockfish and Retreat soon-to-be-created camp for youth with “problematic use of drugs, mental health conditions or adverse childhood experiences,” according to a March 2024 Cumberland County Board of Commissioners agenda
- Prevention education programs in Cumberland County Schools
Despite all the work the county and its partners are doing to address the opioid crisis, Cumberland County is still among the top three counties for overdose-related hospitalizations, according to county overdose data from NCDHHS.
“There’s still a lot of work left to do,” said Berry in his remarks at the ribbon-cutting ceremony.
He is particularly concerned about xylazine, an animal tranquilizer that is increasingly mixed into the county’s drug supply, particularly into fentanyl. Almost 67% of Cumberland County drug samples sent to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Street Drug Analysis Lab for testing came back positive for xylazine, according to the lab’s North Carolina Xylazine Report. Overdose-reversing medications like naloxone don’t work against xylazine, making it an especially deadly additive. Xylazine also causes easily infected ulcers and other skin wounds.
“We’re seeing more and more people in the community showing up with these wounds because they don’t know that this illicit adulterant is in the drug supply,” Berry said. “We really want to raise awareness to people about adulterants that are in a drug supply.”
Berry encouraged the community to pick up drug tests for additives like xylazine at the Department of Public Health, Cumberland County Detention Center’s naloxone vending machine or C-FORT Recovery Resource Center.
If you or a loved one are looking for resources for an opioid use disorder, visit the C-FORT Recovery Resource Center’s website or in person Monday – Wednesday and Friday from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. or Thursday until 7 p.m. A list of substance use disorder treatment programs in Fayetteville can be found on rehabs.org.
More information on Cumberland County and North Carolina’s use of national opioid settlement funds is available on the CORE-NC and More Powerful NC websites.
CityView Reporter Morgan Casey is a corps member with Report for America, a national service program that places journalists into local newsrooms. Morgan’s reporting focuses on health care issues in and around Cumberland County and can be supported through the CityView News Fund.