Young Alumni Award Winner Gives Recovering Addicts Years of Life Back

The Glenn College Young Alumni Award serves an opportunity to recognize the tremendous accomplishments of alumni who have achieved success quickly following graduation. This year’s recipient, Sarah Nerad, a 2015 MPA graduate, is an inspiration for all due to her work as an addiction treatment and recovery advocate—she is a person in long-term recovery since 2007.

While attending undergraduate school she was selected to go to Washington to meet with government leaders about collegiate recovery programs. “When I was brought to Washington D.C. to learn more about the Substance Abuse Mental Health Services Administration, I realized the collegiate based recovery programs that I benefited from were not all over the country,” said Nerad. “It was in that moment that I set out to ensure everyone could have access to these types of programs.”

Sarah has made it her life purpose to create the same opportunities that she had to enter and sustain recovery for other young people across the country and currently serves as the Associate Director of Community Relations in Ohio for Alkermes. In this role, she works with all levels of community leaders to promote practices and policies that advance systemic and lasting change to end the opioid epidemic.

Prior to her work at Alkermes, Sarah worked at The Ohio State University for over four years where she created the Collegiate Recovery Community (CRC), a support program designed to help students in recovery from alcohol and other drug addiction. The program quickly grew from Sarah as the only part-time graduate administrator to a program with two full-time staff members and a 28-bed residence hall. In her time at Ohio State, she also helped create the Higher Education Center for Alcohol and Drug Misuse Prevention and Recovery at Ohio State and served as its Director of Recovery.

Previously Sarah was appointed to serve on SAMHSA’s Advisory Committee for Women’s Services, representing the needs of women and girls in recovery. She was a founding member of Young People in Recovery and a past board member of both the Association of Recovery Schools and Ohio Citizen Advocates for Addiction Recovery.

Sarah’s current passion project is serving as a founding board member of Heartland High School, a recovery high school in central Ohio. “I am proud to say that because of our efforts other communities are beginning to start recovery schools,” Nerad. “We need to do everything we can to help people entering and sustaining their recovery and then getting their life back. That’s what our programs do—give years of life back.”