In today’s rapidly evolving environment, leaders across industries often grapple with complex challenges that demand innovative solutions. Whether it’s addressing the opioid epidemic or streamlining departmental inefficiencies, the key to progress lies in fostering collaboration and breaking down silos.
In this episode of the Life + Leadership podcast, Tegan Trovato speaks with Dr. Kelly Firesheets, VP of Strategy and Partnerships for Cordata Community Services. Kelly shares her experiences in private philanthropy, where she learned to bring diverse individuals and organizations together to combat the opioid crisis in the US. Her story highlights the power of building unusual coalitions, leveraging data, and fostering genuine relationships to drive meaningful change.
This article will explore key insights from Kelly’s journey, offering actionable strategies for leaders who want to cultivate collaboration, embrace innovation, and achieve impactful results.
From Evaluator to Investor: A Serendipitous Turn
Kelly began her career as a program evaluator, responsible for measuring the impact of the foundation’s investments. After 13 years, she transitioned to a program officer role, where she could directly influence investment strategies.
When the board of directors decided to dedicate funding to address the emerging heroin epidemic, they struggled to find an expert to manage the initiative. Despite her initial hesitation and lack of specific expertise in addiction, Kelly was asked to lead the effort.
This unexpected opportunity taught her a valuable lesson about leadership: Sometimes, a fresh perspective can be an advantage. Instead of relying on preconceived notions, Kelly focused on asking questions, gathering data, and listening to diverse voices. As Kelly stated, when her CEO told her to take the position, “You’re real smart. You’ll figure it out”.
Building Unusual Coalitions: The Pancake Strategy
Faced with a complex problem, Kelly recognized that different groups were looking at addiction, but not with each other. To bridge these gaps, she started a simple, yet effective strategy: inviting people to breakfast.
- The Power of Pancakes: Kelly used informal meals, especially pancake breakfasts, to bring together stakeholders from various sectors, including health commissioners, law enforcement officers, and addiction treatment providers. Kelly noted that the 7-7:30 a.m. time slot at a pancake restaurant worked for everyone.
- Openness to Being Wrong: These gatherings provided a space for open dialogue, where Kelly and other participants could share ideas, challenge assumptions, and identify common goals. Kelly also remained open to the possibility that her ideas may be wrong.
- Informal Connections: She also emphasized the importance of face-to-face interactions in building trust and fostering collaboration.
Kelly also made it a point to connect with the “women who get things done” within these networks. She recognized that these individuals often held the key to implementing initiatives and driving progress.
From Data to Action: Measuring What Matters
As an evaluator, Kelly had a deep appreciation for the power of data. She relentlessly sought data to understand the scope of the opioid epidemic, identify trends, and measure the impact of interventions.
However, she also recognized that data alone was not enough. She learned to balance her love for data with the need for human connection and empathy.
Quick Response Teams: A Model for Collaboration
One of Kelly’s proudest achievements was the development of Quick Response Teams (QRTs). These teams, comprised of law enforcement, EMS, and addiction treatment professionals, proactively reach out to individuals at risk of overdose, offering support and connections to resources.
The QRT model has been replicated across the United States and has become a nationally recognized intervention. Kelly credits the success of QRTs to the collaborative spirit, the shared commitment to saving lives, and the willingness to try something different.
Lessons from Law Enforcement: Relationships Matter
Working closely with law enforcement officers taught Kelly the importance of building trust and fostering genuine relationships. She learned that these relationships required a different level of authenticity and vulnerability than typical professional interactions.
By investing in personal connections, Kelly was able to have more honest conversations, navigate conflicts, and ultimately, achieve better outcomes. She also learned to “casual down,” trading her suit for jeans and the occasional bourbon at the bar.
From Non-Profit to Tech: A Consistent Thread
In her current role in the tech industry, Kelly continues to apply the lessons she learned in the nonprofit world. She emphasizes the importance of understanding the problem first and using technology as a tool to support, rather than dictate, the solution.
Cultivating Collaboration, Innovation, and Impactful Results
Kelly Firesheets’s journey offers valuable insights for leaders seeking to tackle complex challenges and drive meaningful change. By building unusual coalitions, embracing data, and investing in relationships, leaders can foster collaboration, spark innovation, and achieve impactful results.
People in this Episode
TRANSCRIPT
Note: Transcript is auto-generated.
Tegan Trovato
Kelly, welcome to the podcast
Kelly Firesheets
Thanks for having me. It’s really exciting to have this conversation today.
Tegan Trovato
I can’t wait. It’s going to be a treat for our listeners.
For our listeners to know, Kelly and I share just a pretty good number of people in common in our network. And we had the opportunity to finally meet in person sometime last year at a dinner. And her work over the years, I have found to be so fascinating and there’s is rich with cross industry leadership knowledge. And so whole point of our podcast is to bring that to you. And so in interviewing Kelly today, I’m going to try to pull some of that that goodness out of her.
I want to start Kelly actually with the job you had prior to the one you’re in now and we’ll come back to your more current role eventually. If you could tell our listeners what was it you were up to in your previous life for work, any details you can give us to set up the scene before I start pilfering you with questions about the leadership lessons in that.
Kelly Firesheets
Sure. So my previous job before I took a turn and went into technology, I worked for a private foundation, private philanthropy. So if you’re not familiar with a nonprofit sector, private philanthropy is almost like the venture capital of the nonprofit world. So when you work in private philanthropy, my gosh, it’s so much fun. You go out, you find amazing nonprofits or amazing issues, and you invest money in them. I think a lot of people are familiar with the Gates Foundation, or sometimes people talk about Robert Wood Johnson foundations, the really big ones, but there are thousands of private foundations across the U.S. And I worked specifically in a cohort of foundations called Health Conversion Foundations. And these are the nonprofit foundations that were formed as we in the U.S. converted health systems and health insurance plans from nonprofit entities to for-profit entities. Very often, it was usually states or communities would set aside a portion of the profits from those sales and put them in these endowments for foundations. They’re all across the country. Many of them do very engaged hands-on work focused on health and public health. And it’s just a really weird niche of an industry that I think most people don’t know exists. And I always tell everybody if you ever get a chance, if you ever get a chance to work at a private foundation, go do it. It is an amazing way to learn how things get done and to really see an innovative side of government and nonprofit sectors that I think in general you don’t get to experience.
Tegan Trovato
Yeah, we don’t think innovation when you use those words. So that’s insightful.
Kelly Firesheets
Yeah, yeah, we don’t. And the systems are, you know, mean, they’re designed to be, and I think probably rightfully so conservative and bureaucratic and slow, because you want to make sure if you’re providing healthcare or housing, you want to theoretically provide it well with effectiveness in proven ways. But there is, gosh, it’s a rapidly changing environment.
And a lot of times I think our government entities and the nonprofit sector really struggle to keep pace with that change. And that’s where private philanthropy has really found a niche of like seeding interesting ideas, bringing people together. And cool stuff comes out of that. Really cool stuff comes out of that.
Tegan Trovato
Yeah. So what was the focus of your work in that part of your journey?
Kelly Firesheets
So initially the focus of my work, I took a role at the foundation as an evaluator, a program evaluator. So it was my job to measure everything that we funded from let’s say a small grant to an organization that was training dental residents to the mission of the foundation, which was to improve the health of people in the region.
So everything across the board, was my job to figure out how to measure it, to figure out how to collect the data, document it, understand the progress, make recommendations for improvements, make recommendations for changes, and then sort of help the, we called them program officers, really the investors in the organization, vet opportunities and make the best grant investments. So I did that for about 13 years.
In that period of time, I wrote two strategic plans, got to measure all sorts of, I mean, you name it, we tinkered in it at some point in time, built a really great department of people, many of whom are still there today, which is fun to see.
And then eventually, you know, after a while you just kind of needed change. And so it was at that point in time that I moved into more the program officer role where I was going to be responsible for investing the money. And I felt like, okay, I’ve measured this. I’ve developed a lot of opinions about what it is to make a good investment. I got ideas. I want to try this myself. I want to see what it’s like to be the person who gives away money and actually makes this stuff happen. So I made that switch after about
Tegan Trovato
I bet, naturally. Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Kelly Firesheets
I don’t know, maybe 10 years of doing evaluation. Yeah.
Tegan Trovato
rate. And the focus of the investments were…
Kelly Firesheets
That’s a story and I’ll tell the story because I think there’s a leadership lesson in it. So I had been, you know, working as the evaluator for a long time and we had at the time this, he was an amazing CEO. He was like a ball of energy and he’d come to us out of the banking sector. So he’s he always thought a little bit differently about things than the rest of us. And we had and this was probably 2014 or 2015.
We could see in our data, we could see the dynamics of addiction changing in our region. And we were hearing from lots of people we were working with about these issues of addiction. And opioid addiction, was really weird to see heroin in rural areas. It was strange what was happening. And so our board of directors said, you know, we need to take a pause. We need to set aside a line of funding and we just need to deal with this heroin thing head on. Like we’re just, we’re going to do it. It’s a need. It’s a problem. So they set aside a line of funding. It was about four or $5 million a year to address the opioid, what we now call the opioid epidemic. Then it was the heroin epidemic. And we did the thing we usually do. We did a national search. We started calling around. You want to have an expert.
Somebody who’s got some expertise on the topic to manage the funding. And nobody wanted the job. Nobody wanted the job. And so the CEO pulled me into his office one day, it was like the end of the day. And he was like, I think you need to take this position. And I was like, no, no, no, I don’t know anything about that. Like, I don’t know about addiction. And he was like, well, aren’t you a psychologist by training? Like, didn’t you, you’re like a doctor and stuff.
Tegan Trovato
Right.Interesting. OK.
Kelly Firesheets
And I was like, but not like that. Like they don’t teach us about addiction in psychology school, which is true. They don’t teach you about addiction. They just teach me about mental health stuff. Like, I don’t know if I can do this. I don’t know enough. And he was like, you know what? You’re real smart. You’ll figure it out. So this is what you’re gonna do. And I was kind of like, shit. Like, shit. I’m gonna, okay, I’m gonna figure it out.
Tegan Trovato
Mm-hmm. Yep. Yeah. Yeah.
Kelly Firesheets
So I was maybe a little grumbly about it for a while. It was not the job I wanted. It was not the thing I wanted to do. But I looked back on it. The confidence he had in me to figure it out, way overstated maybe, right? But as an employee at the time and as a person who really was trying to figure out how to develop and grow and what would come next for me,
Tegan Trovato
Sure. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Kelly Firesheets
It did something, right? Like, it did something. And all along I would be like, you know what, I don’t really know. And he’s like, you figure it out. You’re smart. Figure it out. So I got… Yeah. It was…
Tegan Trovato
That sounds like life changing belief in you. And I have to imagine then as a leader you’ve given that to other people because you know what it felt like, right?
Kelly Firesheets
I know what it felt like and I also I think now can really appreciate that there are some times and there are some problems where you’re actually at an advantage if you don’t have expertise. Like really are because I did the only thing I knew to do which because I had been the evaluator. I started I just I asked a lot of questions and I looked for data. Where’s the data? Can I see your data? What are the data say?
Tegan Trovato
Absolutely, yes.
Kelly Firesheets
Like, what does the research show? And I would meet with anybody. Like, I would hear any weird cockamamie scheme to solve the opioid epidemic. And there were some cockamamie schemes, right? And so I sort of just started meeting with people and talking to people and listening to families, listening to people in active addiction. I would put on my jeans and go get in line at the syringe exchange and just like…
talk to the people who were clients of the syringe exchange and say, tell me about like how’d you end up here? And like, what are you doing? right, like, do you want to go to treatment and just try to absorb as much of it as I could? I mean, I was a psychologist, so I knew a lot about human behavior, but I’d also spent, you know, 10 years measuring projects and programs in this space. And so I knew enough to know what made good work.
Tegan Trovato
Yeah.
Kelly Firesheets
What made things work, what program structures needed to be in place. And so I could easily say, okay, that’s a good idea. Like it’s weird, but it’s a good idea and I think we could pull it off. And so I was able to start to build really weird coalitions of people who maybe even didn’t know each other, but like by talking to them, I was like, okay, you two are actually really closely allied, like let’s go have lunch and see what happens when we start talking to people and just kind of getting people together and like sharing ideas. And I used to say, make it a deal. Like I want to make a deal. Let’s sit down and talk about this.
Tegan Trovato
So what would make a coalition weird? Give us some context so that we don’t have to imagine from our own seats.
Kelly Firesheets
So here’s the thing you don’t want to know as a citizen of your town, but you need to know as a citizen of your town, is that odds are your health commissioner has never met your sheriff or your police chief hasn’t had a sit down meeting with anyone who works for the large addiction treatment provider or the health system.
So the first thing I figured out really quickly is there are a bunch of people in all of our communities, and I was working in 20 counties at the time. There are a bunch of people in all of our communities who were looking at the problem of addiction and looking at the problem of opioid addiction, but they weren’t necessarily looking at it together and they weren’t talking to each other. So it’s the whole like, you you’ve got one piece of the elephant and you can’t see the other piece of the elephant problem.
But you could start to see really quickly like, these two people, they see the same challenge, but they’re trying to deal with it differently. So one of the great examples in my hometown, in greater Cincinnati, we had a health commissioner who was really adamant about getting better, faster data on overdoses.
Which is a shared passion. So, you know, so I like to chat with him because we agreed that like at the time at the beginning of the opioid epidemic, the best data you could find would be overdose data from five years ago. And we’re like, yeah, what are you doing with five year old data? Like we are driving our car while looking in the rear view mirror. This is not gonna function. He was really passionate about it. Now his driver, to be honest, I just like data.
Tegan Trovato
Mmm, it’s hard to act on that. Yeah, right.
Kelly Firesheets
His driver was that he had a working hypothesis that most of the people who were overdosing were not making it to the emergency department or to addiction treatment. So he kind of had a hunch that there were all these overdoses happening and those people were never going into the systems where we hoped or assumed they would be, the emergency department and addiction treatment. And he wanted the data.
If he would say that to the hospitals, they would say, oh no, we get lots of overdoses. We see them. We got it. And if he would say that to addiction treatment, they would say, oh no, we got tons of this. But he wanted to see what he couldn’t see. I think he wanted, in some ways, he wanted to prove he was right. He wanted to take it to those other partners and say, look, I told you so. He had an ally in a police chief who
Tegan Trovato
Good. Yeah.
Kelly Firesheets
had officers who were responding to 911 calls that were overdoses. And then watching these people say, no, no, no, I don’t wanna go to the hospital. No, I don’t wanna go to treatment. And then the officers just left. They were just walking away from these people. And the officers would come back and be like, I don’t know, this seems like not the right thing. Like, because they’d get the call the next day, the next day.
And sometimes they get the second call and now the person’s died, right? So is…
Tegan Trovato
This is not the right thing, meaning their intervention wouldn’t be the right intervention for what was happening. Is that a way to say it?
Kelly Firesheets
Yeah, they’re showing up and they’re seeing people and they’ve overdosed and all they can do is be like, hey, this is dangerous. Would you like something else? And if people said no, that they were just like, okay, we’ll leave now. Yeah, and over time, what happens is those people overdose again and they die. And you would see, you know, I’ve got…
Tegan Trovato
That was, they were powerless. Right. No other resource.
Kelly Firesheets
friends who work in law enforcement who tell stories about watching three generations of the same family die of overdose. And they knew, they could see, they knew it was gonna happen and they had no way to do anything productive. So I could see these two people, they’re thinking about it from a very different perspective and they’re asking for really different things, but they’re pointing out the same problem, which is that we’ve got a group of people and they’re really at risk. They’re gonna die if we don’t do something.
and we can’t see them and we don’t have a mechanism to intervene. So, okay, what does that look like? What could we do here? Yeah.
Tegan Trovato
All right, I’m gonna pause you.
I want to just recap for listeners. I’m going to just bring it into corporate speak, right? Because we’re talking and you’re now in corporate, so I’m just going to rename all this. We’re talking very specific industry systems level, like civil interjections, right? But when we bring this back, like what I hear from a corporate lens is they’re inside of organizations, different departments often see the same problem.
Kelly Firesheets
Mm hmm. Yes.
Tegan Trovato
And they all they all have different ways they might approach solving it because they have a different vision for the you know potential end result the opportunity is to then pull our collective insight and Really decide what the winning solution is gonna be which I have a feeling is where you’re taking us when you say Let’s make a deal. That was your thing. Like let’s make a deal. So how did you get? Folks with I mean frankly When I hear who you’re describing I like feel different energies in my body like I feel this really buttoned-up.
I feel this like, you know, like cop who really has to see some of the ugliest hardest sides of the world and like so how do we get them to make a deal? Tell us the rest of the story.
Kelly Firesheets
We buy pancakes. We buy pancakes. They tease me now. They’ll be like, if Kelly invites you to breakfast, know that she’s got, she’s up to something. We’re gonna have pancakes. We buy pancakes.
Tegan Trovato
You’re gonna eat the pancakes. Uh-huh. Mm-hmm.
Kelly Firesheets
And I always chose breakfast because that like 7, 7, 3 a.m. pancake restaurant time slot works for everybody. Regardless of schedule, I could get an ER doctor and a health commissioner and a law enforcement officer in the same place at the same time, like in that little nook.
But then it became a thing. it’s so quickly, Kelly’s taking you to breakfast. Wonder what she’s working on. So it quickly became a thing which helped actually. Like now people know there’s an expectation we’re gonna have pancakes and we’re gonna do some work. So I just started buying breakfast and I would just be like, hey, I just wanna think about this with you guys. Like, what are you doing? What are you doing? Huh, isn’t that interesting? Not really trying to push.
Sometimes I had an agenda. Sometimes my agenda won. Sometimes we had the conversation and it was clear to me my agenda was wrong. And I’ve got a bunch of examples of times where I’d bring people together and be like, I think this is great. And then walk out of the meeting and be like, I was very wrong. You guys, it’s not great. Yeah. Yeah.
Tegan Trovato
Yeah, but what I hear is the openness to be wrong, which is maybe different from how some of the other partners might come into that, right? So yeah.
Kelly Firesheets
So I bought people pancakes. mean, if there’s like one simple thing, get the coffee, right? Like just the FaceTime, you know, and reflecting on kind of how the work has grown and evolved, we’ve let that go as a collective. I think we do more of the screen stuff and it’s fine, but it’s not the same.
Tegan Trovato
It’s not as attractive to watch people eat pancakes virtually. It’s weird. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Kelly Firesheets
It is not. is not. Or it’s delicious, quite honestly. The deliciousness of it is part, I think, maybe of the intervention. So, I mean, we just did a lot of really informal meals. Breakfasts, coffees, conversations. And you start to sniff out the people who are gonna be the doers.
Tegan Trovato
Yes.
Kelly Firesheets
And then you start to sniff out the people who are going to be important and influential, but they’re not going to be the doers or the drivers. Maybe I need their buy-in or maybe I just need them to stay out of the way for a little bit, but they’re not going to be like the doers. I also learned really quickly that in every network, especially in the government sector, in every network, there was a network of powerful men.
Tegan Trovato
That makes sense.
Kelly Firesheets
And then there was a network of what we started to call the women who get shit done. And the powerful men have, for the most part, every single one of them has a woman who gets shit done. And so I was in the really interesting position of being at the table with the powerful men. So we’d start coalitions and I was in the suit in the boardroom at the table from the powerful men. But I always made it a point to get to know the chief of staff.
Or the, my gosh, like the administrative assistant who manages the calendar, like all the people who get shit done, and they were usually women, like this was the dynamic I was dealing with, and really get to know them and sort of bring them into the cause, like, hey, this is important, because in the long run, those people were the ones who wrote the grant proposal.
Tegan Trovato
Yep.
Kelly Firesheets
or put the PowerPoint presentation together, or made sure that the week was blocked off for the conference. Those kind of things became really important as time went on. I was the only one whose full-time job it was to solve the opioid epidemic. Everyone around me had a full-time job, and I was asking them to do this.
Really frustrating, not politically popular, unfunded side project with me. So, you know, it had to be really compelling and it had to be easy for them to show up and engage in it.
Tegan Trovato
Mm-hmm. Yeah.Okay.
I’m going to recap some of that that I just think is so powerful. First of all, just the statement of having the full-time job to solve the opioid epidemic. Hi. Just a little lift, just a little thing you did once. So huge, though, in all sincerity. And as you started talking about pancakes and what happens at pancakes, I was immediately like, what is her archetype going to be? What’s your role going to be at pancakes? And I’m hearing this whole recipe.
you’re like the broker. So that I heard like the recipe was thought partnership, being open to like being wrong and releasing your own hypothesis. When it is your job to solve the crisis that had to be a bigger lift than we were kind of being cute about it. That had to be hard sometimes. You operated with a ton of curiosity, facilitator of conversations.
I appreciate that there was a level of informality that made this work and I kind of wonder if we could get to some of that in corporate America.
Because everything is so time crunched and agended and like we at BrightAire are constantly like, hi, where’s the relationship? Because that’s actually what’s going to make this go. And that informality for me is really speaking to me right now, like the value of that. You identified the doers, you identified the influencers, that’s a yes for every project and everything we’re ever going to touch, so huge.
So those stood out as some of the big components of what started to make the coalitions come together. Is there anything I missed or anything else you’d add?
Kelly Firesheets
mean, in the interest of full disclosure, and I have to be very upfront about it, keep in mind I worked at a foundation. So I had a budget. And it’s amazing what you can get done with a discretionary budget. And I joke with people when they ask me about it, because now there’s lots of people that work in this space and they fund in this space. So people will ask. And I was like, you know, the most impactful investments I made, we made good grants. We really did good programs. But a lot of the impactful investments I made were the breakfasts, the pancake breakfasts. One time at a conference, a national conference, I took six health commissioners to dinner and I ran up a thousand dollar wine tab which is
Tegan Trovato
yeah.
Kelly Firesheets
Which in the corporate world is like not a thing. Nobody’s blinking at that in my new life. But in my old life, it was like getting called to the principal’s office scandalous. You spent how much on wine? But I had the six health commissioners there because there were two or three that were doing some harm reduction activities that were controversial, but I wanted done in lots of places.
And so I bought the wine, like whatever they wanted. Yeah, get that bottle and that bottle and that bottle. And by the end of the night, all of the six health commissioners agreed, yeah, we’ll all do this and we’ll do it together. That way, if it’s controversial, right, we kind of have the cover of the other people doing it. So, you know, we made a deal and I look back on it I’m like, God, that thousand dollars was a great investment. Like I could have spent hundreds of thousands on fancy consultants probably, or I could have spent hundreds of thousands on lobbying, but I spent a thousand dollars and I bought some wine and we had a great evening and a great conversation and out of it we got action. So, you know, I think having the ability to spend money in
Tegan Trovato
Yes, you could.
Kelly Firesheets
creative and flexible ways that build those relationships and facilitate those conversations. I made my organization so uncomfortable. And I know lots of times I was like, oh, you’re not gonna like this, but here’s what I’m doing. But yeah, to their credit, they were just kind of like, all right, figure it out, right? Like you’ll figure it out.
Tegan Trovato
Yeah, act first, apologize later, does work as an approach. Yeah, yeah.
Kelly Firesheets
And they let me do and try a lot of things that were a little bit non-traditional. But at the same time, we were in this context of like, I did have the advantage of getting to go to the National Office of Drug Control Policy and to Johns Hopkins and to Seattle to do site visits and learn and talk to people who are experts.
And really quickly we realized like nobody knows how to solve, no one knows what the solution is. So we might as well try something different because there was no evidence-based practice that we could pick up and bring in. We were gonna have to figure out how to make it work here for us in Southwest Ohio. And that’s kind of what we did.
Tegan Trovato
Yeah.
That statement also stands out to me. Nobody knew what the answer was, so we had to try something different. And I think we’re in such a time as leaders, regardless of industry, where there’s nothing but ambiguity and speed, right? And so the ability to just be really courageous and try something different is probably more important than it’s ever been. Use data where you can, obviously, as you would, as much as you heart data. You smiled so big when you said, love data earlier. I was like,
Kelly Firesheets
I love it.
Tegan Trovato
Okay, no did. But I really like that’s such a that’s such a powerful point as well. Like we just had to try something different and you did and off it went. I assume like if you could talk about some of the outcomes, what would you share as like things you’re proud of from all of those efforts and bringing those coalitions together?
Kelly Firesheets
So I think… There’s a few things. The first thing that I’m still very proud of, I’m proud of that health commissioner dinner and those bottles of wine because those interventions that were, that was probably seven years ago, really controversial, like front page of the newspaper controversial are now part of my community and all these communities. It’s a thing we do every day and nobody blinks and the world didn’t end. So, and those are the, the harm reduction type interventions like syringe exchange and fentanyl test strips for audience members who are wondering.
Those kind of things, like there was evidence behind that. We knew that if we could do that, we could keep people alive and we could keep people from getting sick. And that felt really important. It felt important to go to battle for and take political hits for if we had to. I also could recognize sitting in the room that working for a private foundation, I was not elected. I was not appointed by elected officials.
Kelly Firesheets
which gave me a little bit more cover to push hard things than a lot of my peers had.
Tegan Trovato
They were beholden to very particular agendas and people.
Kelly Firesheets
Yeah, yeah. mean, when you are a health commissioner, you can’t even if it’s the right thing to do for public health, you can’t just piss everybody off like you won’t keep your job for very long. And so that was a place where I was able to kind of step into to a role and push something and we’ve made something happen and it’s there to this day and it’s sustained and that feels so good. My my baby, my pride and joy out of all this,
Tegan Trovato
Yeah, beautiful.
Kelly Firesheets
is an intervention we call a quick response team, a QRT. And this is a, it’s super intuitive, but also was at the time super unusual. It’s a collaborative response usually involving law enforcement, EMS, and addiction treatment people. And when someone overdoses or we know that they’re addicted or we know they’re at risk of being addicted, that team of people, they work together, they go out, they meet with people, they talk to them, they offer them help, they connect them to resources, and they fall
follow up with them over time to help get them motivated to get the services they need. And when we started doing it, I mean, it started with a police chief who’s in suburban Cincinnati. His name is Dan. He and I still work together to this day. And it was like Dan and Nan who worked on the addiction treatment side, and they were like knocking on doors at motels, like talking to people, trying to get him to go to treatment. was it was kind of rough and tumble. And when I met with Dan, I was like, well, let me see your data. And Dan was like, I don’t have time for data.
people are dying. And I was like, okay, well what’s your outcome? What does success look like? Still very in my evaluator role, right? And Dan was like, if I get a hug from somebody or somebody’s parent because I’ve helped them, that’s success to me. And I was like, that’s good. That’s a good talking point. But like, nobody’s gonna give you money for hugs.
Tegan Trovato
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Of a long-standing friendship. That’s amazing.
Kelly Firesheets
Nobody’s gonna give you money for hugs. And Dan told me to fuck off. That was the beginning of our relationship. He told me to fuck off.
But over time, I think he understood nobody was going to give him money for hugs. And so we started working together to figure out, first of all, what should we measure? What data should we collect? How do we make this easy to do? And as we were working on this, this idea, this collaborative idea, it’s like it went viral.
So, you know, the county east of here, they called and they were like, are you talking to Dan? We want to do that too. Can you help us? And then, you know, people in Kentucky called and like, we’ve been talking to Dan. We want to do this too. So soon we had this cohort of like eight to 10 communities that wanted to do this QRT thing. And. I was like, okay, we’re, we’re on to something. Like we, we have to be on to something because this idea is like replicating itself and we’re not asking anybody to do it. I’m not paying anybody to do it. I haven’t like put out an RFP to start a quick response team. It’s just happening. So we got to, we got to run with this. We’re going to, we’re going to see what happens with this title wave. Um, and so, you know, we are 10 years this year.
It’s our 10-year anniversary of me and Dan meeting each other 10 years later. That intervention, the Quick Response Team intervention, is the most widely replicated overdose response intervention in the US, which is wild. Really wild. Again, not so much because of us, because it just started going. But it’s given us the opportunity to teach other people how to do it.
And also given me the satisfaction of being able to measure it. So now we can start to talk more elegantly and in a more informed way. Yes, we get hugs, but there are real outcomes for people and communities from this intervention. And we can talk about that in an informed way. You know, and we’re seeing now we’re having conversations about state adoption and it’s been adopted into the federal language that the CDC uses and that SAMHSA uses and that the Department of Justice uses. So it’s gone from kind of a cockamamie idea to the way we do things here. And that is pretty amazing to be part of.
Tegan Trovato
It’s exceptional and it may be a once in a lifetime thing. Let’s hope not. Let’s hope there’s a bunch more of these experiences. But what I’m hearing is, know, when you bring the right people together for a shared end result and they share in the value of that end result, it can just go. And these, know, and the how did you refer to that team again? Not emergency response.
Kelly Firesheets
Yeah. Yeah, it can just go.
Tegan Trovato
quick response team. mean, even in corporate America, if we could have a quick response team model for certain things, we could get more done, right? Especially that kind of passion behind it. So just taking that lesson from you as well. So we have just a little more time together. There’s three more things I want to cover with you. We could do this for another hour. I have a feeling because there’s so much I’d love to keep asking. One, when you and I met before, you mentioned one of the greatest lessons you learned from the cops from working with the police officers. I’m curious if you could share that with our listeners today, because I think we could all benefit.
Kelly Firesheets
Yeah, yeah, law enforcement is a fascinating world. And I knew nothing about it when I started this work. But when I met Dan, of course, now I’m working with law enforcement. And the quick response team intervention, mean, it’s largely law enforcement engaged or law enforcement led in most places.
All of a sudden I was running around with cops and I came from, I mean, you mentioned the like the casual, the informality of it, but I did not start that way. Like this is the product of working with law enforcement for a while. I did not start that way. I was a person who wore a suit and sat in an office and thought about things and made PowerPoint presentations about them using, yes.
Tegan Trovato
Right, yeah. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah.
And I know that would make them die laughing and also not interested in sitting in on it, right? So yeah
Kelly Firesheets
Yes, using fancy nonprofit jargon, right? Like that’s who I was and that’s how I was trained and that’s what I was doing. And law enforcement is just a fascinating profession because most of what they do really is life or death. And so a good working professional relationship to them is a person you would trust with your life if you were under fire.
Tegan Trovato
Yeah, right. Yep.
Kelly Firesheets
Like it’s just a different standard and I didn’t understand that going in. These guys, first of all, they really pushed on me to casual down. Like you can’t dress like that if you’re gonna go to a meeting with these guys. They think you’re stuffy and they’re not gonna trust you. So they really sort of taught me a different kind of code switching, like a professional code switching of like, yeah, there’s a time to put your suit on, but then there’s also a time to like put your jeans on and have a bourbon at the bar and just get to know people. But they were very, and have always been very adamant, like they wanted to hang out in real life, which I thought was very strange. We didn’t do that. You had like office friends, right? Like, and you’d go to the office party.
Tegan Trovato
Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah.
Kelly Firesheets
but you didn’t hang out with your coworkers in real life. That was odd to me. But they needed to know me as a person to trust me. And we, for the first couple of years, there was a lot of, I think, like unspoken tension in our relationships, because I was very like, no, no, the peas are in this section of the cafeteria tray, and the potatoes are over there, and I do not want the peas and the mashed potatoes to mix. I like them in their little compartments and they really pushed me to get out of the box. Go on a ride along. They were like, get in the car, go on a ride along. Like, go into conferences, come out with us at night. Like, we’re gonna go see this band, like come do this thing. And over time we built these real, real relationships, friendships, like actual ones. So that now, like Dan, who I mentioned before, I text his wife about as much as I text Dan, right? Like, so we know each other and I know his wife and we’ve been on work trips together where she and I go out to dinner and you know, like we’ve really kind of embedded each other in our lives. But I think the reason that matters and the reason that helped us is because you can have a different level of blunt conversation with somebody who is your friend than your colleague.
Like, and we have the ability to pick up the phone, even to this day, to pick up the phone and call each other and say, you know what, you really pissed me off. Just as an example, Dan and I were at a conference in December and I was presenting my outcomes, my glorious data outcomes. And he got excited. He’s learned to love data. He got excited and he jumped in. He wanted to share another point. He interrupted me in the middle of the conference presentation. And I was just like, Dan?
Are you gonna Kanye me? Like, no, wait your turn. And he said, no, no, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. And so I finished and then I was like, and Dan wants to pipe in and Dan’s like, yeah, there’s this other thing that I wanted to point out to you all. Now Dan did that, think, because our audience was law enforcement and he wanted them to hear something that would specifically matter to them. But like, you can’t interrupt people in a professional presentation. And then after the fact, I was like,
Tegan Trovato
Uh-huh, but only a friend. You could only say such a thing with a friend, right?
Kelly Firesheets
Sorry Dan, like maybe I kind of, he’s like no no it’s cool we’re fine, but somebody came up to us afterwards and they’re like I want to work with you guys because it’s clear that you have an actual relationship. Like who has that exchange in such a public place? And that’s 10 years of knowing each other, like 10 years of fighting with each other, 10 years of working together.
If we had just stayed on the in the office professional email level of relationship, we wouldn’t be able to have that. And we now wouldn’t be in a position now that we’ve moved into a more kind of competitive, right? We’re teaching people, we’re consulting, we’re offering training. That is our competitive advantage. That relationship appeals to people and they want to be part of it.
Tegan Trovato
Ugh, that’s a powerful statement. Yeah, that’s a powerful statement. I’m curious in like 60 seconds or less, let’s see how this works out. If you can kind of describe for me what it’s been like now moving into tech and if there’s a way that you would describe bringing lessons from that old world into the new world.
Kelly Firesheets
There’s so much. They’re not that dissimilar. I mean, they really aren’t that dissimilar. I think tech too often becomes a solution in search of a problem. Like, I mean, I see this in technology a lot that like, it’s really easy to be like, well, this is the thing we sell. And so we need, we’re gonna convince you to have the thing that we sell because we sell it.
And we’ve worked really hard as we’ve built this company and we built this technology solution to focus more on, okay, what’s the problem that you have and how can we bring technology in as part of the solution because technology is never gonna solve any complicated problem. It’s about the systems and the people and the ideas, but we can help make those things easier and safer and more secure.
So we had to make that shift and we had a hard time in the beginning and we had a sales team that was always trying to like sell some widgets. And we really had to pause and rethink the way we work in technology. I see more tech companies thinking that way now. But for me, that has been the hardest shift is going from, all right, let’s build, let’s solve this problem to let me insert my solution. Because I think that sometimes distracts from the problem solving. And I do think tech can operate better if it is at the table as a problem solver, as opposed to a product.
Tegan Trovato
Yeah. Yeah, ooh. Well, these are hot times for that statement to be made. So thank you for sharing that. And I think anyone in an organization, since we are all using tech and looking for more ways to use tech, that is a powerful statement. So thank you for that.
All right, well, in closing out, Kelly, I’m going to ask you what I like to often ask our guests, and that is, knowing that you have a mic and thousands of senior leaders listening to you today, what’s the one thing you would love for them to be thinking about or kind of taking away from your experience?
Kelly Firesheets
I mean, number one, relationships matter. Invest in relationships. Invest in relationships. But number two, will say addiction and the opioid epidemic, there’s still an issue. Like it’s still a big issue and it is impacting people you know and it’s impacting your employees and your communities. And there really is a role to play for everybody in promise. There’s a role to play for everybody in solving this issue. And so I think the more that we can have business leaders and thought leaders from different sectors kind of sticking their toe in this and asking questions and helping us think about it, the closer we’re going to come as a country to finding the right solutions for every community.
Tegan Trovato
Yeah, wonderful. Kelly, thank you so much. Thanks for the work you’re out doing in the world, number one. Thank you for being in community with me. It’s been so rich getting to know you, and I look forward to more of that. And thank you for sharing all of your insights and wisdom with our listeners today. I really appreciate the time.
Kelly Firesheets
Thanks for the conversation. It’s been great.
