Bursa Metropolitan Municipality
The Pitch
Bursa built a free, municipality-run addiction recovery center offering prevention, counseling, family support and peer mentorship, helping reframe addiction from a source of stigma to a public health issue that families can address openly.
The Problem
Addiction was a growing public health crisis in Bursa, yet many young people and their families lacked access to affordable treatment and feared seeking help because of stigma. With free rehabilitation services extremely limited, many struggled without support, allowing the problem to worsen largely out of sight.
The Process
- Repurposed an existing municipal building into a dedicated counseling space, featuring therapy halls, seminar areas and waiting lounges
- Offered free psychosocial counseling, recovery mentorship, awareness education and transportation to treatment centers, removing cost as a barrier for low-income households
- Hired recovered individuals as peer counselors, converting former clients into paid staff who both reduce stigma by example and give current clients credible, lived-experience role models
- Prioritized confidentiality and nonjudgmental framing to directly counter stigma
- Held public-awareness campaigns to shift the public’s perception of addiction from a punitive issue to a medical one
- Connected health, social services, education and law enforcement institutions, making addiction recovery a coordinated medical response
- Worked with schools to train teachers to recognize early signs of addiction, and delivered prevention and personal development programs to high schoolers before problems escalated
- Supported entire families through counseling and education, recognizing that long-term recovery depends on strengthening relationships at home as well as treating addiction
- Adapted service delivery through disruption, introducing online counseling during COVID-19 so support continuity would not depend on in-person infrastructure alone
- Added a Smoking Cessation Counseling Unit in 2025 with free carbon monoxide testing, extending the model to a lower-stigma entry point that can draw people into the broader recovery system
The Impact
- Delivered 35,100 individual counseling sessions since 2015 to 2,985 people with addictions and 2,750 relatives, reaching roughly 6,000 direct beneficiaries
- Helped 65% of participants continue treatment and 72% successfully reintegrate into society, with 78% of beneficiaries between ages 15 and 35
- Provided 2,550 free rides to treatment centers
- Converted the peer-counselor model into a functioning employment pathway, giving recovered individuals paid work while measurably reducing stigma among current clients
- Institutionalized addiction response inside city government, culminating in a dedicated Department of Health Services and Addiction Prevention that elevated GADEM's field data into social policy planning
- Expanded from a few neighborhoods to citywide coverage, including rural and underserved districts, through partnerships with schools, law enforcement and NGOs
- Inspired replication interest from Istanbul, Ankara and Izmir, with GADEM's peer-counseling approach presented at national municipal forums as a model for other Turkish cities to adopt
