10 Million People: The Plan Behind the Number

Starting With the Problem, Not the Goal

The United States has roughly 48 million people currently living with a substance use disorder. About 10% of them are receiving any form of specialized treatment in a given year. The gap between the people who need recovery support and the people who are getting it is one of the largest unaddressed health crises in the country.

Most of the effort to close that gap has focused on the treatment end: more clinical capacity, better insurance coverage, reduced barriers to medication-assisted treatment. All of that matters. None of it fully solves the problem, because treatment is not the same as recovery. Treatment is what happens in a clinical setting, often for weeks or months. Recovery is what happens for the rest of someone's life, and for that part, the clinical system largely leaves people on their own.

The Phoenix model addresses the part that treatment doesn't: the ongoing, daily, indefinitely sustained human community that the research consistently shows is the difference between people who maintain long-term recovery and people who don't.

Reaching 10 million people with that model over five years means reaching roughly 20% of the people currently living with a substance use disorder in America. Not all of them. Not immediately. But enough to demonstrate, at a scale that changes the policy and funding landscape, that community-based peer recovery support is not a nice supplement to clinical treatment. It's a necessary infrastructure in its own right.

The Three Levers

The operational plan for reaching 10 million people runs through three simultaneous tracks. None of them gets there alone.

The volunteer network.

The Phoenix currently has about 4,000 volunteers delivering programming across all 50 states. By 2028, the plan calls for 30,000. That's not arbitrary. It's the number that, when distributed across the country's approximately 3,100 counties, puts at least some Phoenix presence within reach of most of the population.

Building a volunteer base from 4,000 to 30,000 in five years requires infrastructure that doesn't scale by just asking more people to volunteer. It requires training systems, regional coordination, quality maintenance, and a way of onboarding people that preserves what makes Phoenix volunteering different from volunteering for any other organization: every volunteer is a person in recovery themselves. That's the model. It's also what makes scaling it genuinely hard.

The investment in volunteer infrastructure is one of the largest line items in the $150 million campaign budget. Not because running events is expensive, but because building the capacity to run consistent, high-quality, Phoenix-model events everywhere, led by volunteers who are themselves supported in their own recovery, takes serious organizational investment.

The digital platform.

NewForm's role in reaching 10 million people is to reach the people the physical network can't. There are communities where 30,000 volunteers still isn't enough density to run daily in-person programming. There are people who can't or won't attend in-person events but who could access peer support digitally. There are hours of the day when no physical event exists and someone needs connection right now.

NewForm also solves a reach problem that is less about geography and more about awareness. A lot of the people who would benefit from Phoenix programming don't know it exists. The app, combined with the 80+ partner organizations already on the platform, creates a discovery mechanism that physical expansion alone can't replicate. When a treatment center completes a discharge plan and NewForm is part of the aftercare referral, that's a reach point the volunteer network never would have touched.

The 10 million number assumes both tracks running in parallel. Physical expansion without the digital platform gets you further than either alone, but the combination is what makes the math work.

The partner network.

The Phoenix is not the only organization trying to reach people in recovery. It is the organization with the most proven model and the strongest outcomes data, but the recovery support ecosystem includes hundreds of credible organizations doing important work.

The Together Transforms Tomorrow campaign doesn't treat them as competition. The NewForm partner network is explicitly designed to integrate them into a coordinated system. When an 80+ organization ecosystem becomes a 300+ organization ecosystem, the reach of the campaign multiplies in ways that Phoenix expansion alone couldn't achieve.

Some of the 10 million people this campaign reaches will be reached through Phoenix programming directly. A meaningful portion will be reached through partner organizations whose capacity and visibility is amplified by being part of the same network. The campaign counts both.

The Timeline

Year one is foundation. Volunteer training infrastructure, NewForm platform expansion, partner network growth, research framework for measuring progress against the 10 million target.

Years two and three are expansion. New markets, scaled programming, growing the volunteer base toward the 30,000 target, deepening partner integration.

Years four and five are reach. With the infrastructure in place and the network dense enough to provide coverage across the country, this is when the numbers compound most significantly.

The 10 million figure is a cumulative total over the five-year period, not a year-five snapshot. People who join Phoenix communities in year one are in the count. The people their year-two volunteering brings in are in the count. The network effects build through the campaign.

What Could Go Wrong

It would be dishonest to write a piece about a $150 million plan to reach 10 million people without acknowledging that plans at this scale can fail.

Volunteer quality is the thing that keeps The Phoenix's leadership up at night more than anything else. The model works because Phoenix volunteers are genuine peers, people in their own sustained recovery, doing this because they know what it meant to have someone show up for them. Scaling from 4,000 to 30,000 while maintaining that quality is the hardest operational challenge in the campaign. If the volunteer experience gets diluted, the outcomes follow.

Technology scaling has its own risks. NewForm works at its current scale. Serving the population implied by a 10 million person target requires infrastructure investments and operational discipline that are assumed in the campaign budget but have to be executed.

And the funding itself. The campaign is 40% funded before public launch, which is an unusually strong start. But $90 million in remaining commitments is not trivial to raise, and the campaign's ability to execute its expansion plan depends on that funding arriving roughly on schedule.

None of these risks make the goal unreasonable. They make it serious. And The Phoenix treats them seriously.

Why 10 Million and Not More

A fair question.

48 million people have substance use disorders. Why set the target at 10 million, which is about 20% of that population?

Because the goal of the campaign is not to serve the maximum possible number of people in five years. The goal is to build the infrastructure that makes it possible to serve everyone who needs it over a much longer horizon.

Ten million people, reached through a rigorously documented model, producing the kind of outcomes the research already shows, demonstrated at a scale that changes the policy and funding landscape, positions community-based peer recovery support as essential public health infrastructure rather than a charitable add-on to the clinical system.

That shift, if it happens, is worth more than any single campaign could directly achieve. It changes what governments fund. It changes what insurance covers. It changes what families looking for help for someone they love understand about what recovery can look like.

The 10 million is the proof. What comes after the proof is the real goal.

The Phoenix is a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. To make a pledge or learn more, visit thephoenix.org