CARE Conference 2025
Community Collaboration for Mental Health and Substance Use Disorder Treatment and Recovery
June 2, 2025; 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.
Location: Capital Plaza, Montpelier, VT
For: This conference is freely available to people working in Vermont on care related to mental health and substance use disorders.
REGISTER HERE [Google Form]
CME, CNE, or CEU contact hour credit available for:
- Prescribers
- Nurses
- Psychologists
- Psychotherapists/Counselors/Social Workers
Email Owen Murray for details
Exhibitor Tables
CARE (Treating mental health and substance use disorders in primary care and other settings)
Delivered by: Dartmouth College Center for Technology & Behavioral Health
Sponsored by: The Vermont Blueprint for Health and Vermont Department of Health
Educational support: Dartmouth Health
Speakers:
Mitchell Barron LICSW, LADC is a Principal with Centerpoint Consultation, Training, and Technical Assistance, providing coaching, guidance, models, evaluation, and support for clinical, organizational, and system-of-care growth and change. This includes quality improvement leadership through the Vermont Treatment Enhancement Program (VTEP) as well as advisory and consultative roles within child protection services, the judiciary/juvenile justice, prevention programming, and community health improvement. Mitch served for 26 years as Director for Centerpoint Adolescent Treatment Services, insuring the highest-quality of care to meet the mental health, substance misuse, and specialized educational needs of Vermont youth and their families. Through his career, Mitch has been a practicing clinician, clinical supervisor, program director, educator, administrator, father, partner, musician, diver, and friend.
Kate Burkholder, LADC, LCMHC is the Assistant Director at Treatment Associates at Washington County Mental Health Services. She has worked as a Clinical Care Coordinator with the UVM Medical center/Central Vermont Medical Center MAT team through the Blueprint grant. She is a dually licensed alcohol and drug counselor and clinical mental health counselor.
Kate has been an active proponent around holistic care for those looking to make changes in their lives around their substance use and/or mental health patterns. Coming from a client-centered and harm-reduction background and work environment, Kate and the team at Treatment Associates—along with the larger community of providers in Central Vermont—have worked to improve outcomes for Vermonters through exploring, creating, and consistently improving processes both within her organizations and throughout the community.
Roz King, MSN, RN is the Chief Division of Research in the Department of Emergency Medicine at the University of Vermont Larner College of Medicine and administers the SAMHSA-funded STAR grant to induct patients with Opioid Use Disorder onto buprenorphine or methadone in the emergency department and connect them to ongoing community treatment after discharge.
Christopher Lukonis, MD, PhD has focused on treating OUD for over 20 years and is board-certified in psychiatry and addiction medicine. He has worked in capacities ranging from the Chief Medical Officer of a multi-state OUD treatment clinic organization (Hubs) to developing an addiction clinic in a small rural Vermont hospital (Super Spoke). Key facets of his medical philosophy are professional collaboration and leveraging treatment networks to the benefit of patients. He is presently the consulting Medical Director for the Vermont Department of Health, Division of Substance Use, where he endeavors to further enhance the extraordinary care available to Vermonters impacted by OUD.
Yngvild Olsen, MD, MPH serves as the Director for the Center for Substance Abuse Treatment (CSAT) at the the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Substance Use and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA). She has a long history of working within the addiction treatment field to expand access to care and enhance quality. Dr. Olsen has held numerous senior volunteer leadership positions in the field of addiction medicine. These have included vice president of the American Society of Addiction Medicine, president of the Maryland Association for the Treatment of Opioid Dependence, and president of the Maryland/DC Society of Addiction Medicine. She also has served on the boards of the National Council on Alcohol and Drug Dependence-Maryland, and Stop Stigma Now, and as a clinical expert to the Providers Clinical Support System (PCSS).
After graduating from Harvard Medical School, Dr. Olsen completed residency training in internal medicine and served as primary care chief resident at Boston Medical Center. She completed a Fellowship in General Internal Medicine at Johns Hopkins, during which time she received a Master in Public Health degree from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Dr. Olsen has written and lectured extensively on opioid use disorder and its treatments, the stigma of addiction, the integration of behavioral health and medical care, and clinical and policy solutions to the overdose epidemic. She draws inspiration from the opportunity to provide care for people with substance use disorders as an addiction medicine specialist and general internist.
Joshua Rutherford joined the Vermont Department of Corrections in 2001. Since that time, he has worked in four of the state’s six correctional facilities, including serving as Superintendent of two of these. Since 2020, he has worked in the Department’s Central Office, holding key leadership roles including Director of Classification and Facility Operations Manager. He currently serves as Facilities Division Deputy Director.
John M. Saroyan MD is the Executive Director for the Blueprint for Health, the State of Vermont’s longstanding health care reform initiative focused on changing how health care is delivered.
Inspired early in life to explore serious illness and how he could ameliorate its burdens and suffering he pursued a pre-medical curriculum at the University of California, Berkeley, medical school at Tulane University and pediatric residency at the University of California, San Francisco’s Fresno program. Dr Saroyan completed pediatric palliative care fellowship and pain management fellowships over two years in New York City before becoming faculty at Columbia University Medical Center. A clinician, educator and researcher, Dr. Saroyan maintained a busy inpatient and outpatient practice of pediatric pain management and palliative care, initiated the Hospice and Palliative Medicine fellowship at Columbia and published multiple peer-reviewed papers about his area of expertise. Seeking “greener pastures” for his family that had grown to include two young boys by 2012, he became a Hospice Medical Director in Vermont and New Hampshire in 2013 providing oversight and direct end-of-life services across the lifespan to individuals and their caregivers.
He entered his current position as Executive Director of the Blueprint for Health at the Agency of Human Services in January 2022
Abby Tassel has been working in the movement to end gender-based violence for over 30 years in community programs and higher education. She is trained in Somatic Experiencing, Trauma Center Trauma Sensitive Yoga, Level 2 Internal Family Systems in Trauma and Neurobiology and has a Certificate in Trauma Studies from JRI. She is presently the Director of WISE’s Multi-disciplinary Interview and Training Center (MITC) where she build’s Vermont’s capacity to utilize expert testimony in domestic and sexual violence cases, facilitates Forensic Experiential Trauma Interviews and works with law enforcement to be more trauma-informed. She also facilitates Vermont’s first restorative justice program for domestic violence with the Hartford Community Restorative Justice Center.
Daniel Wolfson, MD, FACEP, FAEMS is an Associate Professor in the Department of Emergency Medicine at the University of Vermont Larner College of Medicine and Prehospital Medicine Division Chief at the University of Vermont Medical Center. Dr. Wolfson also serves as the State of Vermont EMS Medical Director.