Martine HelouAllen

I've been on my own since I was young and started my own personal training business, working myself through junior and senior year of high school. Thanks to great mentors in my life, I was able to apply and received a full scholarship to Furman University, where I studied health and exercise science and political science. I've always loved helping people, motivating them to achieve their goals, but I also have a strong passion for public service. My career took me to work for a Japanese company in New York, then I felt I needed to get back to my roots, so I went back to Lebanon, where I'm originally from, and lived there for about 10 years with great career opportunities. When I came back to the United States, I started working in public radio, which then led me to being a civilian in a law enforcement agency where I got to work in public service. At that time, one of the issues I was addressing for my county was the opioid crisis, and my question was: what are we doing to prevent this from happening to more families and young people? I couldn't find a lot of boots-on-the-ground programs, so I set out on a quest to get into public health and make a phenomenal, effective drug prevention program that did things differently, because we really hadn't been doing drug prevention well in this country for 20 years. I didn't want to replicate what had not worked. I started at a law enforcement agency and established RISE Prevention officially in June of 2021. My own personal journey of being affected by addiction, whether in my family or personally, and my journey to heal myself, I never knew how big of a role that transformation would play in what I now do professionally. I love my job, and the fact that all of those things came into play - the personal experience, the education in the health field, the education from the political side - for it all to come together and culminate into a public health nonprofit that helps youth where I once was, it's just an awesome privilege.