Maryville College has been awarded a half-million-dollar community grant from the State of Tennessee’s program, which will support a student prevention program called “Bridges to Wellbeing.” The community grant, totaling $561,172 over three years from January 2026 through December 2028, was secured by Amy White, Director of Grant Development at Maryville College.

Designed by Claudia Werner and Emily Dobias of the Maryville College Counseling Center, Bridges to Wellbeing is “a more individualistic plan for students where they can choose what they feel will work best for them,” Werner said.

“The Counseling Center and our internal/external partners will provide a menu of choices to help each student find their own path to manage the stress of college (and in life) and the challenges that come with it while decreasing the reliance on unhealthy choices to ‘survive’ through college,” added Werner, the center’s director. “We want all our students to have the ability to focus on their best life while they are here and use this knowledge as a stepping stone to their future lives.”

The Tennessee Opioid Abatement Council Assembly established the Tennessee Opioid Abatement Council as a way to determine the best ways to spend money received from lawsuits related to the opioid crisis. This public health emergency began in the 1990s with aggressively marketed prescription narcotics that eventually led to record overdose numbers. Nationwide, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 105,000 Americans died from drug overdoses in 2023, and 76% of those were due to opioids.

“Knowing that more funds were needed to both support the prevention education work the Counseling Center was doing under the grant, knowing that funds were needed to support the counseling and mental health support services that students need on campus, I worked with Claudia and Ben Stubbs (vice president and dean of students at MC) to see if this could be an opportunity for the Counseling Center to apply for funding under the ‘primary prevention’ category,” White said. “We wanted to develop a strategic approach for prevention education with evidence-based strategies to ensure that our college students are resilient and can learn the coping skills needed to deal with stress and challenges and avoid future substance abuse.”

Because the College applied for a “primary prevention” community grant, White added, the money will be spent on prevention strategies and programs that address many of the stressors and mental health challenges that could play a role in substance abuse, if unaddressed. Mental health concerns are on the rise, Werner said, and every college has some students who struggle with substance use and addiction.

“All of these factors can lead to substance use at some level,” Werner said. “College students typically underreport their use and are less likely to seek help with it.”

The idea behind Bridges to Wellbeing is to not only strengthen prevention programs, but to dismantle the stigma associated with not only substance abuse, but mental health care in general. “We have worked hard to reduce the stigma of utilizing counseling services,” Werner said. “This experience with our new ‘Bridges to Wellbeing’ program, funded by the State of Tennessee Opioid Abatement Council community grant, will be very helpful in continuing our journey to help students thrive here at Maryville College and utilize the Opioid Abatement grant funds in an effective, helpful way.”

Maryville College is a nationally-ranked institution of higher learning and one of America’s oldest colleges located in Maryville, Tennessee, between the Great Smoky Mountains National Park and the city of Knoxville. Maryville College offers more than 60 majors, seven pre-professional programs and career preparation from their first day on campus to their last, in the words of our Presbyterian founder, to “do good on the largest possible scale.”

Karen Eldridge, Executive Director of Communications: karen.eldridge@maryvillecollege.edu.

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