How Sedgwick County and the City of Wichita Are Putting Opioid Settlement Funds to Work Through Strategic Procurement
When Sedgwick County and the City of Wichita announced the opening of Request for Proposals (RFPs) tied to opioid settlement funds, it sent a clear message to the procurement world: public health crises demand not just funding, but thoughtful, structured processes to ensure that money reaches the right organizations and delivers measurable outcomes. This initiative represents one of the more compelling examples in recent memory of how procurement tools — specifically the RFP process — can serve as a vehicle for genuine community transformation.
For procurement professionals, public administrators, nonprofit leaders, and business owners who work in the social services or healthcare space, this development is worth examining closely. It offers lessons not just about opioid recovery funding, but about how to design, issue, and respond to RFPs that carry significant social weight.
Background: The Opioid Settlement Landscape
Over the past several years, states, counties, and municipalities across the United States have been receiving settlement funds from major pharmaceutical companies, distributors, and pharmacy chains that were found to have contributed to the opioid epidemic. These settlements, totaling billions of dollars nationally, come with both an opportunity and a responsibility: the money must be used to address opioid use disorder, support recovery, and prevent future harm.
Sedgwick County and the City of Wichita, Kansas, are among the jurisdictions that have received a share of these funds. Rather than quietly absorbing the money into general budgets, local officials made a deliberate decision to open the process to the community through competitive RFPs. This approach ensures transparency, invites diverse organizations to propose solutions, and holds recipients accountable for delivering results.
The decision to use an RFP process rather than direct grants or sole-source contracts is itself a meaningful policy choice — and one that has significant implications for how the funds will ultimately be deployed.
Why RFPs Are the Right Tool for Public Health Procurement
Some might wonder: why use a formal RFP process for distributing public health funds? Couldn't the county and city simply identify trusted nonprofits or healthcare providers and write them checks? In theory, yes. In practice, doing so would open the door to favoritism, inefficiency, and missed opportunities to engage innovative providers.
The RFP process brings several critical advantages to the table when public funds are at stake:
Transparency and Accountability
When a government entity issues a public RFP, it creates a documented, auditable trail. Every qualified organization has an equal opportunity to submit a proposal. Evaluation criteria are defined in advance. Award decisions are justified against those criteria. For opioid settlement funds specifically — which are subject to public scrutiny and legal oversight — this level of transparency is not optional. It's essential.
Access to Innovation
The opioid crisis has spawned a wide range of intervention models: medication-assisted treatment programs, peer recovery support networks, harm reduction initiatives, housing-first approaches, and more. By issuing an open RFP, Sedgwick County and Wichita essentially invite the full ecosystem of providers to compete. This increases the likelihood that the most effective, evidence-based approaches will rise to the top — not just the most well-connected organizations.
Defined Scope and Measurable Outcomes
A well-crafted RFP forces the issuing organization to get specific about what it wants to achieve. How many people should be served? What does "success" look like at six months, one year, three years? What populations are the priority? These questions, when answered in the RFP document itself, create a framework for vendor accountability that a simple grant agreement often lacks.
What Procurement Professionals Can Learn From This Initiative
Whether you work in government procurement, nonprofit administration, or private sector consulting, the Sedgwick County and Wichita RFP initiative offers several transferable lessons.
Lesson 1: Align Your RFP Structure With Your Mission
One of the most common mistakes in public health procurement is issuing a generic RFP template that fails to capture the nuances of the problem being addressed. Opioid recovery is not a simple service delivery challenge. It involves trauma-informed care, coordination across systems (criminal justice, housing, healthcare, employment), and long-term relationship-building with vulnerable populations.
A procurement team developing an RFP for these funds should ensure that the document itself reflects this complexity. That means including sections that ask vendors to describe their approach to cultural competency, their track record with specific populations, their partnerships with other community organizations, and their data collection capabilities.
If you're building an RFP for a similarly complex public health initiative, tools like CreateYourRFP can help you structure your document in a way that captures all the relevant dimensions without missing critical evaluation criteria. An AI-powered RFP generator can help ensure that nothing falls through the cracks — especially when your team is working under time pressure or doesn't have deep experience in a particular service area.
Lesson 2: Define Evaluation Criteria Before You Receive Proposals
This sounds obvious, but it's frequently overlooked. Evaluation criteria should be locked in before a single proposal arrives. For opioid-related RFPs, this might include:
- Demonstrated experience in substance use disorder treatment or recovery support
- Organizational financial stability and capacity to scale
- Quality of proposed outcomes and measurement methodology
- Community relationships and cultural responsiveness
- Cost-effectiveness per person served
- Alignment with evidence-based practices recognized by SAMHSA or similar bodies
By defining these criteria upfront — and weighting them appropriately — the evaluation committee protects itself from unconscious bias and ensures that the most deserving organizations receive funding.
Lesson 3: Make the RFP Accessible to Smaller Organizations
One of the persistent criticisms of government RFP processes is that they favor large, well-resourced organizations that have grant writers on staff and lawyers who can parse complex procurement language. For opioid recovery funding, this can be particularly problematic, because many of the most effective community-based organizations are small, grassroots, and under-resourced.
Sedgwick County and Wichita would do well — as would any public entity issuing similar RFPs — to consider ways to lower the barrier to participation. This might include:
- Hosting informational webinars or pre-proposal conferences
- Offering a simplified application format for smaller funding amounts
- Providing a clear point of contact for questions
- Allowing collaborative or consortium proposals from multiple small organizations
This is also where technology can play a role. Platforms that simplify the proposal-writing process help level the playing field, giving smaller nonprofits a fighting chance against larger institutional competitors.
For Vendors and Nonprofits: How to Respond to an Opioid Settlement RFP
If your organization is considering responding to the Sedgwick County or Wichita RFP — or to similar opioid-related procurement opportunities in your region — there are several best practices to keep in mind.
Read the RFP Thoroughly Before You Write Anything
This seems self-evident, but many proposals fail simply because the respondent didn't fully read and internalize the RFP requirements. Pay close attention to:
- Eligibility requirements (geographic scope, organizational type, prior experience)
- Funding amounts and allowable uses
- Required attachments and certifications
- Evaluation criteria and their relative weights
- Submission deadlines and formatting requirements
A proposal that doesn't directly address the stated evaluation criteria — no matter how compelling the underlying program — is unlikely to score well.
Tell a Data-Driven Story
Government evaluators reviewing opioid RFPs are looking for evidence that your approach works. That means you need to come prepared with data: how many people has your organization served, what outcomes did they achieve, and how do you know? If you don't yet have robust outcome data, be honest about that while explaining your data collection plan going forward.
At the same time, don't let data overwhelm the human story. Evaluators are also people, and they respond to narratives that illustrate the real-world impact of your work. A well-placed case study or testimonial (anonymized appropriately) can make your proposal memorable in a sea of spreadsheets.
Be Specific About Your Budget
Vague budgets raise red flags. Show that you've thought carefully about how you'll use the funds, what the cost per person served will be, and how the requested amount relates to your proposed outcomes. If you're requesting a significant sum, be prepared to justify it with detailed line items and a narrative explanation.
Demonstrate Community Partnerships
One of the hallmarks of effective opioid recovery work is coordination across systems. Evaluators will want to see that your organization doesn't operate in a silo. Letters of support from partner organizations, formal memoranda of understanding, and descriptions of referral networks all strengthen a proposal significantly.
The Broader Significance: Procurement as a Public Health Tool
The Sedgwick County and Wichita initiative is part of a larger national trend. As opioid settlement funds flow to communities across the country, the question of how to distribute them effectively is becoming one of the most important procurement challenges of our time.
Done well, this kind of public procurement can:
- Direct resources to the organizations best positioned to help
- Create accountability structures that improve program quality over time
- Build institutional knowledge about what works in opioid recovery
- Establish models that can be replicated in other jurisdictions
Done poorly, it can waste precious resources on ineffective programs, create barriers for community-based organizations, and fail the very people the funds were meant to help.
This is why the craft of RFP writing — and the discipline of procurement more broadly — matters so much in this context. The RFP is not just an administrative document. It is a statement of values, a theory of change, and a mechanism for accountability all rolled into one.
Practical Steps for Government Entities Issuing Similar RFPs
If you're a procurement officer, public health administrator, or elected official involved in distributing opioid settlement funds in your jurisdiction, here are some concrete steps to guide your process:
Convene a cross-functional planning team that includes public health experts, community members with lived experience of addiction and recovery, legal counsel, and procurement professionals.
Conduct a needs assessment before drafting the RFP. What gaps exist in your current service landscape? What populations are underserved? What evidence-based interventions are missing?
Draft the RFP with clarity and specificity. Use plain language where possible. Define technical terms. Be explicit about what you're looking for and what you're not.
Build in a meaningful review period. Allow potential respondents enough time to prepare quality proposals — especially if you're hoping to attract smaller community organizations.
Use a structured scoring process. Assemble a diverse evaluation committee, train members on the scoring criteria, and document all decisions.
Communicate with all applicants. Notify unsuccessful applicants and, where possible, offer feedback on their proposals. This builds trust and helps organizations improve their future submissions.
Tools like CreateYourRFP can support several of these steps, particularly in the drafting phase, by helping teams generate well-structured, comprehensive RFP documents that cover all necessary components — from scope of work to evaluation criteria to submission requirements.
Conclusion: Procurement With Purpose
The opioid epidemic has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives and devastated communities across the United States. The settlement funds now flowing to counties and cities like Sedgwick and Wichita represent a hard-won opportunity to begin repairing that damage. But opportunity alone is not enough. The process by which funds are allocated matters enormously.
By choosing to issue open, competitive RFPs, Sedgwick County and the City of Wichita are signaling a commitment to transparency, accountability, and community engagement. They are treating procurement not as a bureaucratic necessity, but as a strategic tool for social good.
For procurement professionals, this is a reminder of why the work we do matters. For nonprofit leaders and service providers, it's an invitation to step forward with your best ideas and most compelling evidence. And for all of us, it's a model worth watching — and, where possible, emulating.
The RFP process, at its best, is about more than contracts and compliance. It's about connecting resources to need, holding organizations accountable for results, and ultimately improving lives. In the context of opioid recovery, that potential has never been more important — or more urgent.