The Addiction Research Institute (ARI) and its digital partner Ediven received the 2025 Google Cloud Social Impact Partner of the Year Award for Crisis Response and Resilience, recognizing its innovative approach to addressing the opioid crisis.
ARI, one of ten scholarly centers and research institutes housed within Texas Social Work, developed the groundbreaking platform Texans Connecting Overdose Prevention Efforts (TxCOPE), which was the lynchpin in the recognition. The digital platform merges emergency responder data with real-time community information, and enables agencies to create targeted, community-specific action plans where they’re needed most.
“We’re connecting data to enable real-time community intelligence to save lives and improve our response to the opioid epidemic,” said Dr. Kasey Claborn, associate professor at Texas Social Work and director of the Addiction Research Institute. “Social workers are the bridge connecting people with lived experience to technology partners and government partners, which is the heart of community transformations like this — we’re leading with digital solutions that tackle some of our most complex social problems.”
The platform, built in partnership with Eviden, a business unit of Atos, and powered by Google Cloud technologies, exemplifies how Texas Social Work’s research directly strengthens communities. Dr. Claborn was recently named a Texas Changemaker by Texas Research for her leadership in addressing the opioid crisis throughout the state.