In March 2024, Tennessee’s Opioid Abatement Council (OAC) approved a three-year grant worth about $1.7 million for a Knoxville nonprofit called Next Step Initiative Tennessee. The state’s own grant workbook classified the organization as “small.” Its Trenches 2 Treatment project was approved for $566,566 in the first year alone, and a little more than a year later, the same grant appeared in a very different kind of state record.
For a nonprofit built primarily to serve people, accepting that money can create another job alongside the mission itself: becoming capable of administering public funds.
On May 28, 2025, fiscal monitoring by OAC concluded that Next Step Initiative had to return $47,312.04 because of expense overages and unallowable charges. The Tennessee Comptroller later conducted a separate investigation and identified at least $76,585.57 in what it called questionable organizational disbursements between July 2024 and March 2025. Those two figures are not interchangeable. Neither is a shorthand finding that the underlying program failed…