Outreach to Honored Long Island Leaders at 29th Annual Long Island Luncheon – “Building Stronger and Brighter Futures Together”
June 22, 2023
Outreach, one of New York’s leading nonprofit providers of life-changing drug and alcohol treatment, honored three outstanding business, labor, and government leaders at the agency’s 29th Annual Long Island Luncheon on Thursday, June 15, 2023, at 12:00 pm. The event, entitled “Building Stronger and Brighter Futures Together” was held at the Stonebridge Country Club in Smithtown, and raised over $200,000 for Outreach’s programs and services.
This year’s honorees were Christine Ireland-DiLeo, Vice President and Relationship Manager at TD Bank; Senator Mario R. Mattera, New York State Senate, 2nd District, and Business Agent, Plumbers Local #200; and Michael Ward, Senior Vice President of Vanderbilt Financial Group. Mr. Ward was presented with the 2023 John Brower, Jr. Memorial Award honoring John Brower Jr., a young man from Long Island who died of an overdose and whose family has since helped Outreach raise thousands of dollars for treatment and awareness.
“We are so grateful to this year’s honorees for putting their time and effort into tackling the opioid crisis, which continues to ravage lives on Long Island,” said Debra Pantin, President and CEO of Outreach. “It is vital that we come together to ensure that people have access to high-quality, compassionate, safe, affordable substance use and mental health treatment programs. It is such a great privilege to have these committed, innovative and generous individuals support our mission and the role we play in providing treatment for Long Islanders.”
For more than four decades, Outreach has inspired individuals and families to achieve a life of unlimited potential by developing and delivering the highest quality evidence-based behavioral health services and training. The non-profit organization offers state-of-the-art assessment, referral, harm reduction techniques, substance abuse and mental health intervention, rehabilitation, and training programs at multiple residential and outpatient locations in New York City and on Long Island. On Long Island, the agency offers outpatient and residential services for adolescents, adults and families. Outreach recently opened a much-needed Integrated Opioid Treatment Program, offering medication assisted treatment including methadone maintenance, at Pilgrim State Psychiatric Center and will open later this year its first residential program for transitional aged youth between the ages of 18-25 in Brentwood. This new state-of-the-art 25-bed facility will provide this much overlooked age group with the support they need to fight addiction and co-occurring mental health disorders in an intensive and supportive living environment.
About Outreach
For more than 40 years, Outreach has provided substance use and mental health treatment services for the communities of Queens, Brooklyn and Nassau and Suffolk counties. The agency began by offering assessment and referral services, and eventually opening the first adolescent residential treatment program in New York, helping to define substance use treatment nationally for young people under the age of 18. Since then, its programs and services have expanded and now encompass outpatient and residential treatment for adults and adolescents, with culturally responsive programming in Spanish and Polish, and for veterans and LGBTQ+ identifying-individuals. The agency’s professional staff members hail from more than 25 countries and are native speakers of languages most common to its client communities, including Spanish, Haitian Creole, French, Russian and Polish.
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