Dr. Chelsea Shore Miller

I am a person in long-term natural recovery from substance misuse, and this work is very full circle for me. I received an open-ended opioid prescription at age 16 in 2005 after tearing my ACL. Because my growth plates weren't closed, they couldn't do the surgery right away, so I had to wait a year for the surgery and then had roughly one year of recovery after that. I was prescribed opioids 2-3 times a day, sometimes 4 times a day, for about two and a half years. It was marketed like Tylenol. While I don't consider myself to have been addicted to opioids, I do consider that to be the gateway to a particular mindset around substances that led to 10 years of active addiction. I'm entering 11 years of recovery this year. That experience led me into collegiate recovery programs in higher education, where I worked for 5 years before transitioning to my current role. The National Opioid Settlement closed in 2021, so it's fairly new. My council has been in existence since 2022, and they used outside consulting for 2 years before wanting an in-house program manager. That's when I was hired in October 2024. As program manager, I'm primarily responsible for council facilitation, which includes drafting policies and procedures. We're the first regional council in Colorado to have a standard operating procedures manual that outlines the different funding mechanisms we use for our grant making and the policies around those mechanisms. I design our applications for funding, our review process, and do all of the post-award grant management and grant administration. I also do a lot of community engagement, finding prevention, treatment, harm reduction, and recovery providers in my three-county region and working with them on capacity building to create a regional network of care for addiction recovery. I love it. I never feel like I go to work.