The rescue mission at the heart of NC’s opioid crisis

by Taylor Knopf, North Carolina Health News
December 2, 2025

By Taylor Knopf

Six years ago, Jami Mundy was released from the Richmond County jail. She said she didn’t want to use drugs anymore. The previous year, she had overdosed nine times, and she wanted a better life for herself and her then-12-year-old daughter.

With few places to go, Mundy ended up at the Richmond County Rescue Mission for a year and half, where she and her daughter received lodging, clothes and three meals a day. Mundy got her driver’s license there. She completed her GED through the classes taught at the mission in collaboration with Richmond County Community College. She received counseling services and attended addiction recovery classes.

“When they started with me, they started from the ground up,” she said. “The convenience of having all the things I needed in one place increased my chances of getting better.”

Now, Mundy has her own home and works as a certified peer support specialist. She draws on her experience with addiction to counsel others in recovery, and she still returns to the rescue mission to support those beginning their own journey.

The Richmond County Rescue Mission is a faith-based nonprofit in a former school building on the east side of Rockingham on the campus of Place of Grace Church. The rescue mission is the only homeless shelter in the county. It operates a cold weather emergency shelter about 120 days of the year, where people can find a meal and a warm place to sleep, shower and launder their clothes. The mission operates a food pantry that serves about 710 people monthly and a clothing closet visited by more than 200 adults and children each month.

With no full-time staff, the mission depends on over 2,000 volunteer hours each month to keep its programs running.

The mission’s location in east Rockingham places it at the center of Richmond County’s opioid crisis. Rockingham — a once-thriving mill town that now is stricken by poverty and addiction — consistently sees the highest concentration of naloxone use in the county. The mission’s neighborhood is within one of the counties hardest hit by the opioid crisis in North Carolina. 

Last year, Richmond County had the highest opioid overdose death rate in the state — 80 deaths per 100,000 residents, according to the state health department. And throughout 2025, Richmond County has topped the list in North Carolina for highest rate of fentanyl-involved deaths, based on monthly reports from the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner.

When money from national opioid settlements started being dispersed to local North Carolina governments in 2022, rescue mission Executive Director Matthew Davis saw an opportunity for the organization to finally get some financial support for its addiction recovery program. 

But for two years, his requests for Richmond County’s settlement funds have been denied. 

Davis told NC Health News that he’s gotten no clear answer why the rescue mission hasn’t received settlement funds, despite going to county commission meetings. He’s sent emails to the state health department asking for oversight, to ensure the money goes to the communities hit the hardest by the opioid crisis. 

While the state provides assistance to local governments in many ways, ultimately the funding decisions are up to local leaders. 

Who decides where the money goes?

States are getting money from several national opioid settlements — totaling more than $50 billion — which drug makers, pharmaceutical distributors and marketing consultants are paying out for their alleged role in fueling the drug overdose crisis that has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives over the past two decades. The settlement agreement dictates that the money be doled out over an 18-year period and be used to address the harms of the drug overdose crisis. 

North Carolina will receive a total of $1.4 billion from those settlements, 85 percent of which goes directly to counties and some municipalities. How local governments spend their dollars is governed by a Memorandum of Agreement created by the N.C. Attorney General’s Office, which local leaders all signed on to. The agreement lays out the processes that local governments must follow to approve spending and the ways they must report their spending on a public dashboard. 

Learn how your county is doing spending opioid settlement funding. Click here: https://ncopioidsettlement.org/trends/local-progress/

North Carolina has been held up nationally as an example for its transparency around how the state is disbursing and spending the settlement dollars and even received an award from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health for its equitable distribution of the funds. 

For instance, local governments can only spend their funds on the evidence-based opioid abatement strategies detailed in the agreement. Local government leaders must vote to approve expenditures during public meetings. 

The remaining 15 percent of North Carolina’s settlement funding goes to the General Assembly to spend, which has led to some debate since they are not held to the same standards and criteria as counties and cities.

The opioid settlement funds are a significant sum of annual money aimed to address an even larger drug crisis, flowing at a time when streams of funding from the federal government are drying up. Academics, advocates, journalists and government officials are paying attention to where the money goes. Already, there have been reports of settlement funds in other states spent on concerts and equipment for law enforcement. Some are calling for additional oversight to ensure that these settlement dollars are spent in a way that maximizes their potential. 

Meanwhile, where the money is most needed is an ongoing conversation across the state.

Many requests, limited funds

Though it functions as a safety net for the county, Richmond County Rescue Mission is largely funded and operated by Place of Grace Church, which supplies the volunteers.

“When they don’t have funds, it’s really hard,” Mundy said. “There is no telling what would happen to these people if the rescue mission couldn’t provide that.”

In Richmond County, organizations submit their applications for settlement funds to the county’s Drug Endangered Family Task Force, which reviews and scores them on a rubric before presenting its recommendations to the county commissioners for a vote. The county has approved a variety of proposals, including naloxone distribution, a peer support program, a mental health first aid course in schools, addiction medication in the county jail and outpatient settings, as well as others. 

“Because we do have more applicants than there are funds available, there’s always going to be some that are not selected,” said Theresa Smith, the task force chair. 

During the last round of funding, Smith said her task force presented commissioners with two proposals — a drug court and recovery housing program — and the commissioners decided to only fund the drug court. 

When asked about the rescue mission’s application, Tommy Jarrell, task force coordinator, said that some organizations that work directly with the rescue mission have received settlement funds, such as the community college that teaches classes on site.

“They all work together and intertwine with each other,” Jerrell said. “We’re not trying to set anything up in a silo.”

But the rescue mission leadership believes their community is being intentionally ignored by the county. There are railway tracks that divide east Rockingham from the rest of the city; Davis says the community carries a heavy stigma because of its concentration of homelessness and drug use.

It’s like being on “the wrong side of the tracks,” he said. 

“That stigma means that even in the midst of a public health crisis, our people are viewed as problems to contain rather than neighbors to help,” Davis said. “The Richmond County Rescue Mission has been working to fill these gaps through evidence-based recovery housing, vocational training, and wraparound behavioral health supports. 

“Without equitable access to settlement dollars and mental health funding, our capacity remains far below the need.”

Small town politics

Gary Richardson, pastor of Place of Grace Church, which supports the rescue mission, has gone before the commissioners to express his frustration at being passed over for funding. 

“The only reason I’ve gotten was that ‘the church would do it anyway.’ The church has been doing it anyway for about 12 years now,” Richardson told the commissioners during a meeting in 2024. “We’ve made a lot of partnerships with everyone but the county, and we’d love to partner.”

Richmond County Commissioner Jason Gainey told NC Health News that he would love to see the rescue mission receive opioid settlement money and be fully funded through the county.

“What they do is a huge step in reversing the curse of addiction and homelessness in our area, and putting those people back to work and being a contributing citizen in our society,” he said.

Gainey’s wife runs the largest addiction medicine program in the county and has worked with the rescue mission to help get its participants treatment. He told NC Health News that the reasons he’s heard for not supporting the rescue mission don’t hold up. Some say the rescue mission and the church are too intertwined. Some people have told Gainey that because the rescue mission is the county’s only homeless shelter, providing county support might encourage neighboring counties to send their homeless residents there. The Richmond County manager and the chair of the county board of commissioners did not respond to multiple requests for interviews.

“So that’s a cop out for not helping, and I think that’s an embarrassment to our county,” Gainey said. “And I say that as a commissioner — we can do better.”

Gainey said the county continues to find technical issues with the rescue mission’s application or technical issues in their building, like the sprinkler system. 

“It’s the craziest thing I’ve ever seen,” Gainey said. ”I told the board ‘This was wrong. It’s the worst thing I have ever seen somebody have to go through in order to just help the community.’”

Support for local governments

As Richmond County weighs how to invest its settlement dollars, other local governments across North Carolina are having similar discussions. While final decisions rest with local leaders, a statewide network of experts provides guidance on effective strategies and helps ensure that the funds are used effectively and in line with the governing agreement.

In North Carolina, a group called CORE-NC consists of four organizations — the N.C. Department of Justice, the N.C. Association of County Commissioners, the UNC Injury Prevention Research Center and the N.C. Department of Health and Human Services — that play different roles in helping local governments spend their money wisely and ensuring that settlement funds are spent according to the terms of the Memorandum of Agreement.

The county commissioners’ association and DHHS provide guidance to local governments on how to best use their funds. 

Nidhi Sachdeva, director of strategic health and opioid initiatives with the county commissioners’ association, said her team has provided more than 2,400 instances of technical assistance to local leaders since 2022. That includes making email connections, answering questions, holding events and trainings, giving presentations at site visits, work sessions and board meetings. Sachdeva said she wants to help county and local leaders get it right and encourages them to ask questions. 

The state-run website that tracks local spending includes a local contact at the bottom of each county’s page for anyone looking for information about the settlement in their county. 

Spending accountability

Sachdeva said the process local governments must follow to spend their settlement dollars is designed with multiple steps to ensure transparency and accountability. Representatives of CORE-NC review the local government spending documents along the way to make sure they align with the requirements and strategies in the agreement. Sachdeva said there are several opportunities to catch a potential error or a proposed expenditure that doesn’t line up with one of the eligible strategies.

“There are many different points within the process for them to make it right, where I hope that in North Carolina, we don’t have cases where spending is misaligned with the terms of the [Memorandum of Agreement],” she said.

Local governments also conduct annual audits of their accounts, and the opioid spending is reviewed through that process. 

The UNC Injury Prevention Research Center’s role in CORE-NC is to collect and process data from local governments and maintain the CORE-NC website, which shows how the settlement money is used, as well as its impact in local communities. The state Department of Justice ensures that local governments comply with the Memorandum of Agreement governing the use of opioid settlement dollars. 

To date, the DOJ has not needed to take legal action against any local government over the settlement funds, according to Daniel Mosteller, associate deputy attorney general at the N.C. Department of Justice. He said his team has primarily provided legal interpretation when county leaders have questions about the agreement. 

“I think we did the right thing in doing the legwork upfront to be very clear on how the money can and can’t be spent,” Mosteller said. “I think North Carolina is a success story on spending this money well.”

Nationally, there has been a call for state attorneys general to have a reporting mechanism on their Department of Justice websites where potential whistleblowers can report mis-spending of the settlement funds. North Carolina doesn’t have one, but Mosteller said he doesn’t think a reporting tool of that kind is necessary because the Memorandum of Agreement is so clear about the ways the money can be used. 

He said that if there was a whistleblower that had knowledge of a county government misrepresenting its spending of settlement money, they could contact CORE-NC and the members would take it seriously. 

Vision for the future

Richardson is still holding out hope that the Richmond County Rescue Mission will receive some funding. He’d like to be able to serve more families.

“We do serve families, but we do not have a specific place to house families. It’s not optimal, but it’s better than the streets,” Richardson said. “If we can get those parents back on their feet, maybe we can get those kids back in a family.

“We also want to be a hub. If you’re dealing with something we want to get you that help — through secular and nonprofit partners,” he continued. “Recovery doesn’t happen if you don’t have somewhere to lay your head and get rest.”

For Richardson, who has been in recovery from addiction for 26 years, the mission is personal. He intentionally moved the church he pastors to the east side of Rockingham and partnered with the rescue mission because he knew how profound the need was in the community. He grew up in the old mill town, just across the street from where the mission is now, and he even attended school in the very building that now houses it.

Attached to the mission’s request for opioid settlement funds are 20 letters of support from local business owners, religious leaders, medical providers, educators, local government officials and law enforcement. 

One of those letters of support was from Nicole Worley, dean of adult education at Richmond Community College, which holds classes — such as digital and financial literacy — on site. Many people living in east Rockingham don’t have transportation to attend classes at the community college, she said, but they can walk to the rescue mission. Since January 2024, 65 people have taken community college courses at the rescue mission. 

She said more than a dozen secured full-time employment, which enabled several to obtain their own housing, Worley said.

“I’ve seen how transformative they have been. Their story needs to be told broadly,” Worley told NC Health News. “They are out there doing the work, but not marketing and promoting themselves.”

Reporter’s notebook: In October, I was copied on an email to state health officials from the director of the Richmond County Rescue Mission with the subject line: “Urgent Need for Direct Support in East Rockingham.” After talking to the director, I called around to people who call Richmond County home to learn more about the area’s history, the dynamics in east Rockingham and the reputation of the rescue mission. Not everyone was quoted in the story, but helped inform it. I reached out to local law enforcement and several county leaders who didn’t return my calls or emails. I also reached out to the state Department of Justice for comment on how they are pursuing any enforcement of spending plans. 

• $40,000 – Naloxone distribution to first responders
• $41,000 – Medication for opioid use disorder treatment in jails
• $86,000 – Drug Endangered Family Task Force (DEFT) strategic planning
• $75,000 – First Health of the Carolinas peer support program
• $75,000 – Community college reentry and employment services for at-risk groups
• $56,000 – Richmond County Schools: Youth Mental Health First Aid
• $20,000 – Sandhills Best Care addiction medication treatment for uninsured individuals
• $99,500 – Samaritan Colony 28-day residential treatment program (12-step model)
• $19,000 – Samaritan Colony to start a women’s program

2025

• $85,000 – Drug Endangered Family Task Force (DEFT) strategic planning
• $75,000 – Sandhills Best Care addiction treatment
• $53,500 – First Health of the Carolinas peer support program
• $91,000 – Samaritan Colony 28-day residential men’s program (12-step model)
• $75,000 – Samaritan Colony startup women’s program (12-step model)
• $75,000 – Sandhills Best Care addiction medication for uninsured individuals
• $75,000 – Richmond Community College: Building Brighter Futures employment-related services
• $85,000 – Drug Endangered Family Task Force (DEFT) Collaborative Strategic Planning
• $35,000 – Naloxone distribution for community and county first responders
• $142,500 – Drug treatment court
• $51,500 – Medication-assisted treatment in Richmond County Jail

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