Donna Wysocki has spent a decade building Wayfinder Recovery Services from a single outpatient office into the backbone of Wentworth County's addiction treatment system. This week, the state recognized her work with its top honor for recovery advocacy.
The State Alliance for Behavioral Health Providers named Wysocki its Recovery Advocate of the Year at the group’s annual conference, citing her role expanding treatment access during Bellwater’s opioid crisis. She is the first honoree from Wentworth County in the award’s twelve-year history.
“Donna took an outpatient program that could see maybe ninety people at a time and built something that’s now serving nearly one hundred seventy, in a county that badly needed it,” said Marion Delp, the alliance’s executive director, in announcing the award. “That kind of growth doesn’t happen by accident. It happens because somebody spends a decade fighting for every grant, every bed and every staff position.”
A decade of incremental wins
Wysocki has led Wayfinder Recovery Services for eleven years, arriving when the nonprofit ran a single outpatient office with a waitlist that regularly stretched past ten days. Under her tenure, Wayfinder added 14 sober-living beds at its Lowertown facility over the past 18 months, bringing its total capacity to 46, and cut the average wait for a treatment bed to under 48 hours.
“I don’t think anybody who does this work for a living feels like they’re owed an award,” Wysocki said. “Every bed we’ve added, every grant we’ve won, came because a family member or a council member or a hospital administrator was willing to fight for it alongside us. This award has a lot of other names attached to it that don’t show up on the plaque.”
Dr. Kwame Asare, director of the Wentworth County Department of Health, said Wysocki’s willingness to publicly push back on funding decisions she disagreed with, including a budget dispute over outreach van funding that nearly collided with a separate arts grant vote last year, made her an effective advocate rather than just a service provider.
Donna will tell a room full of elected officials exactly what she thinks, in language they can’t misunderstand, and then she’ll go back to work the next morning like nothing happened. That combination is rarer than people realize, and it’s a big part of why Wentworth County’s numbers look the way they do now.
Dr. Kwame Asare, Director, Wentworth County Department of Health
Recognition with strings attached
Dr. Angela Whitcombe, chief executive of Bellwater General Health System, said the hospital’s own behavioral-health expansion has depended on close coordination with Wayfinder’s outpatient and sober-living programs, particularly for patients discharged from the emergency department after an overdose. “We can stabilize somebody in our ER, but if there’s no bed waiting for them at Wayfinder, that stabilization doesn’t mean much,” Whitcombe said. “Donna has made sure that bed exists more often than not, which is the hardest part of this whole system to get right.”
Wysocki said the recognition comes with an unofficial expectation that she’ll spend more time advocating at the state level for funding formulas she says shortchange counties like Wentworth relative to more urban areas. She said she plans to use the award’s public platform to push for permanent, rather than grant-dependent, funding for programs like the county’s outreach van initiative, which has relied on a patchwork of state grants and city budget lines that must be renewed annually.
“I’d rather not be back at this podium next year explaining why a program that’s working had to be cut because a grant cycle ended,” Wysocki said. “An award is nice. What I actually want is a funding source that doesn’t evaporate every twelve months.”
Measured by the people it reaches
Wysocki pointed to individual stories as the measure she cares about more than the award itself, citing Curtis Boone, a Cedar Hollow man who went through Wayfinder’s outpatient program and now trains new volunteers for the county’s outreach van program, as the kind of outcome that doesn’t show up in a grant application.
“Curtis is proof the model works when the pieces are actually in place at the same time,” she said. “An outreach van that finds somebody, a bed that’s open when they’re ready, and then, eventually, a job and a reason to help the next person. That’s the whole system working the way it’s supposed to.”
Wayfinder’s board plans to hold a reception next month recognizing the award, which Wysocki said she would rather spend discussing the county’s upcoming budget cycle than her own accomplishments. “Give me twenty minutes to be gracious about the plaque,” she said, “and then let’s talk about next year’s outreach van funding, because that’s the thing that actually keeps people alive.”
A career that started small
Wysocki said she took the Wayfinder job after a decade working as a caseworker in the county’s child welfare system, a background she said left her with little patience for programs that looked good in a grant application but didn’t change outcomes on the ground. “I’d spent ten years watching families cycle through systems that measured themselves by how many people they served, not by whether those people’s lives actually got better,” she said. “I told the board when they hired me that I wasn’t interested in running that kind of program here.”
Marion Delp, the state alliance’s executive director, said the selection committee weighed several nominees this year but that Wysocki’s data stood out, particularly the drop in wait times for a treatment bed. “A lot of advocates can tell you a compelling story,” Delp said. “Fewer can back it up with numbers that hold up when you ask a county health department to confirm them. Hers did.”
Wysocki said she plans to use part of the award’s modest cash stipend, roughly $2,500, to fund a small emergency transportation account for clients who need a ride to an appointment but have no way to get one, a gap she said she hears about constantly from her own staff. “It’s not going to solve a systemic problem,” she said. “But if it gets ten people to an intake appointment they otherwise would have missed, that’s ten people who don’t fall through a crack because of a bus schedule.”