Greg interviews Bill Ayars, the founder of The Emerald Jenny Foundation, a comprehensive database of recovery resources in Ohio. Created in memory of his daughter Jennifer Emerald Ayars, the foundation is a nonprofit organization dedicated to helping families find treatment for their loved ones.
Greg asks Bill about the challenges he and his high-school sweetheart, Susan, faced in searching for help for their daughter. Bill explains that the biggest problem they encountered next to not knowing what to look for was overcrowding. “We would get names of places… [and] the challenge was most of the places were full. There are all these places out there and these people are working hard to help people, but if they were full either they wouldn’t call back or they really didn’t give much help in terms of where else to call.” However, Bill furthers, it was this experience and their research that led to the start of The Emerald Jenny Foundation. “It was probably about 6 months later and Susan and I sat down and just outlined in sketch form what our challenges were. And we thought if we could find the resources and just be able to categorize them enough to help people get started… We thought if you could be able to go on a website, pick a location, say male/female, residential treatment, outpatient treatment, or these recovery residences and a few more categories – if you could pull that up, just click those, and then it would organize a list of four to six places that you could focus on. We thought that would’ve helped us.”
Listen to the podcast to discover how The Emerald Jenny Foundation is continuing to work to make the road to recovery easier to travel.
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