Scaling Hope – Alumni – Harvard Business School


30 Jun 2022

Scaling Hope

Motivated by his family’s experience with addiction, Stephen D’Antonio is now assisting inform others about the illness

Re: Steve D’Antonio (MBA 1986)

Subjects: Personal Advancement- GeneralHealth-Health Care and TreatmentSocial Business- Not-for-profit OrganizationsCareer- Profession Modifications

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In 2014, Stephen D’Antonio (MBA 1986) was living the life he had actually constantly visualized. He had actually been a partner at Morgan Stanley for almost 20 years. He sat on the company’s management committee and was the COO of the worldwide set earnings department. D’Antonio and his other half were raising 5 kids, all of whom were participating in excellent schools; the oldest was working on Wall Street. Then, all of a sudden, late one Saturday night, their youngest kid, age 16, returned house in tears. He had actually been about to take his own life, he informed his moms and dads, driven by an alcohol addiction he had actually concealed from them. It was a night that would alter both his kid’s life and D’Antonio’s.

Today, both males work in the fieldof addiction treatment D’Antonio’s kid, now with more than 6 years of constant sobriety, is trained as a peer recovery coach, supporting others who have a hard timewith addiction D’Antonio, trained as a moms and dad peer coach for households, is utilizing his years of business experience to develop the tools he wanted had actually been readily available when his family was facing addiction and is sharing his own experience of the recovery course. He remembers an early speech he offered about his kid’s illness at his 35th reunion at Dartmouth College. ” People thanked me for informing their story,” he remembers. “There is a lot preconception around addiction, and people do not truly share that they have this issue going on in theirfamily That develops a sense of seclusion and keeps people from getting help.”

After D’Antonio retired from Morgan Stanley, in 2016, to focus on his family, he rapidly recognized the requirement for more availableinformation on addiction What was readily available felt spread and thick– composed for specialists, instead of laypeople. “Even for people who are used to cranking through cases and coming down to the essence of what the issue is and what the service is, it was simply frustrating,” he observes. In reaction, D’Antonio cofounded the podcast series My Kid & & Addiction to inform and assistance moms and dads with kids who are having a hard timewith addiction The podcast, which grew out of an in- individual support system and was released in combination with the Caron Treatment Centers in 2017, takes on difficult subjects, consisting of relapse, pity, secrecy, and worry, with insights from specialists and moms and dads.

That sensation of disappointment likewise triggered D’Antonio to register, in 2018, in the Harvard Advanced Management Effort, a program developed to help recognized leaders produce scalable social modification. D’Antonio understood he didn’t desire to begin a brand-new not-for-profit, as there are lots of reputable companies currently working in the field. Rather, he desired a much deeper understanding of the social effect sector, psychopharmacology, neuroscience, and public health, so that he might best use his experience to improve an existing not-for-profit’s work.

In 2019, D’Antonio signed up with the national not-for-profit Unbreakable as executive vice president, with a focuson family education One of his very first jobs was an electronic knowing platform, Simply 5, which was marketed to significant corporations. The program provides 5- minute, online lessons that provide the most necessary information about addiction, consisting of the vital understanding that addiction is a brain illness, instead of an individual stopping working.

” It ends up that, in the typical business in America, 25 percent of workers are straight dealing with addiction; 9 percent have an addiction issue themselves and 16 percent have a reliant or instant family member with the issue,” D’Antonio states. JPMorgan Chase was the very first to embrace Simply 5; about 60 other companies use it today.
D’Antonio likewise is assisting to fund research study into the treatment of addiction, and he just recently penned a moving collection of essays–” Love the Kid, Dislike the Illness”– that he launched as a site ( https://addictionlessons.com) and is being incorporated into the family education programs of treatment providers like Hazelden Betty Ford and Caron Treatment Centers.

His supreme message is one of hope. That’s what he didn’t understand in the start: “I want I had actually understood that there was hope, a lot of hope, and that recovery was most likely to take place for my kid,” he composes now, “I want I had actually understood that my kid might live an incredible life, drug and alcohol complimentary.”

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