Skoun—Reaching a Population in Need
Drug and alcohol addiction and abuse have become a major problem in Lebanon. People suffering from addiction have few places to turn due to a social stigma that keeps many people from seeking treatment, a legal environment that emphasizes punishment over rehabilitation, and a lack of infrastructure for those who do want help.
Skoun, created in 2003, is a non-profit, non-political, and non-sectarian Lebanese organization that aims to prevent and treat drug abuse, while advocating legal changes to improve the status of drug users and facilitate their reintegration into society. To that end, Skoun has led the charge in introducing new services to help addicts: For example, it was the organization behind the legalization of methadone as substitution therapy, and the first organization to establish a walk-in outpatient therapeutic facility in Lebanon.
With many such early successes, Skoun started growing rapidly, increasing revenues from around US$300K to over $1 million and reaching a point at which its leaders were being pulled in many different directions and became concerned about losing their strategic focus. Skoun asked Booz & Company to help develop its strategic plan and the best initiatives to support it, in order to differentiate Skoun in Lebanon and regionally as similar organizations enter the market.
We have worked with Skoun’s leaders to help them better understand the organization’s current strengths and capabilities, based around its ethical, non-judgmental, holistic approach, with an overarching concern for patient individuality, confidentiality, and integrity.
Additionally, we worked with the organization to build its planning capabilities and define its strategic plan based on its strengths. As a result, we identified initiatives in six areas: treatment, prevention, advocacy, governance, information technology, and financing/ fundraising. The Booz team worked jointly with the Skoun team to identify and organize these initiatives in waves and develop a timeline for operationalizing the organization’s strategy.
Our aim was to equip the Skoun team with a comprehensive and actionable strategic plan that can serve as a template for the way forward. With project charters and workplans for each initiative complete, the Skoun team is now in a position to take full ownership of the plan and execute against it, with the appropriate tools to support implementation and metrics to gage their performance. The final presentation was completed this fall and the Booz team is providing continuous follow-up on initiatives to support a smooth implementation.
The Booz & Company team is excited to be involved in this collaboration with Skoun: It is very rewarding to be part of a project that will reach a Lebanese population in need and provide a service that could have a substantial impact on society.