Why we exist

Systems drop people who never signed up for them. The OPA RASA Foundation started in 2018 to hand those people a map.

We started with people in recovery, because that is where our founder came from. Stephen Deason has been sober since August 30, 2015. A man newer in recovery, sleeping in his car, moved onto the floor of Stephen's spare bedroom, got hired at the company where Stephen worked, and stayed seven or eight years. In 2018 Stephen took a CFO job on one condition: that he could hire from the recovery community.

Since then the Foundation has worked to place hundreds of people from disadvantaged backgrounds into a variety of careers, and twenty-seven people have gone through its mentoring program. The work kept reaching the same people: veterans, people coming home from prison, people without housing, older adults stuck at home, and people whose families stopped speaking to them. So we write down what we learned, publish it through Alder Creek Editions, and point you to it from here.