From the Tents of Los Angeles to Tech Innovation: Matthew’s Journey with The Evergreen Fund. The Entrepreneurs in Recovery series focuses on Unlikely Heroes.

On a Wednesday night in West Hollywood, a small group gathered in a living room for an unusual meeting: Entrepreneurs in Recovery. There was no pitch deck. No venture capital. Just people in recovery talking about ideas—businesses they wanted to build, problems they wanted to solve, futures they wanted to believe in.

The premise was simple but radical:

that the same traits often pathologized in addiction—risk-taking, intensity, obsession, creativity—could become assets when properly supported.

Among the regulars was a man named Matthew Meakin: tall, bright-eyed, endlessly curious, and brimming with ideas. He spoke fluently about startups, systems, and social change. He also happened to be addicted to fentanyl.

A Life Balanced on the Edge

Before Matthew ever entered that living room, he had survived more overdoses than he could count. Over two decades, he cycled through more than thirty treatment centers. At his lowest point, he lived in the tents of downtown Los Angeles, part of the unhoused community where fentanyl and heroin functioned as both currency and anesthesia.

His parents, Leslie and Marcus, had spent years—and nearly all of their savings—trying to help him. Like many families navigating severe addiction, they oscillated between hope and heartbreak, intervention and exhaustion. By the time Matthew reached his late thirties, the future felt grim.

Statistically, his story should have ended there.

The Evergreen Fund’s Core Belief

The Evergreen Fund was founded on a different assumption:

recovery does not happen in isolation, and it does not sustain itself without purpose.

Abstinence alone may stabilize someone temporarily, but it rarely builds a life worth protecting. For people with severe substance use disorders—especially those with entrepreneurial temperaments—recovery requires more than symptom management. It requires agency, meaning, and a path toward contribution.

Entrepreneurship is not a reward for recovery.

It is often the mechanism that makes recovery possible.

A Second Chance, Structured for Growth

In 2019, Matthew connected with Alex Shohet, founder of The Evergreen Fund and Red Door Life. What Alex saw was not just a person in crisis, but a person whose core strengths—intelligence, creativity, drive—had been hijacked by addiction rather than extinguished by it.

Through Evergreen’s scholarship support, Matthew was given something rare in modern treatment systems: time. Time to detox safely. Time to receive trauma-informed care. Time to fail without being discarded.

The first year was not linear. Matthew relapsed. He hid things. He experimented. In many programs, these behaviors would have triggered expulsion. Instead, Evergreen and its partners treated relapse as data, not disobedience. Each setback became an opportunity to refine support rather than withdraw it.

Over time, Matthew learned something foundational:

he could be honest about his struggles and still remain connected.

From Stability to Capability

As Matthew stabilized, something else emerged—capacity.

He earned his commercial driver’s license and began working in the entertainment industry. He launched Overdose LA, a grassroots harm-reduction initiative distributing Narcan at Pride events, music festivals, and on Skid Row. He developed Mitra Wellness, aimed at helping people taper safely off prescribed medications before turning to riskier alternatives.

Eventually, Matthew became a sober companion, traveling internationally to support others in crisis. For the first time in his adult life, he was financially independent.

This is a critical inflection point that Evergreen tracks closely:

economic agency is a protective factor in recovery.

When people can earn, build, and create, they stop relating to themselves as problems to be managed—and begin seeing themselves as contributors.

Why Entrepreneurship Matters in Recovery. Unlikely Heroes!

Entrepreneurship does several things that traditional treatment rarely does:

• It restores agency in people whose lives have been governed by institutions.

• It channels dopaminergic drive into creation rather than consumption.

• It creates future orientation, which addiction systematically erodes.

• It replaces learned helplessness with iterative problem-solving.

• It embeds recovery within community, not compliance.

For Matthew, building wasn’t a distraction from recovery.

It was the structure that allowed recovery to hold.

Innovation as Continuation, Not Departure

By 2024, Matthew was ready to build again—this time at scale.

He approached Evergreen with a question: could blockchain and cryptocurrency be used to support recovery, particularly for people struggling with gambling, trading, and financial addiction?

Together, they launched Onchain Wellness, a program designed for the decentralized financial services community. In 2025, Matthew taught himself to code, entered a Coinbase hackathon, and built a concierge application for live events. The project was selected for use at the Coinbase Summit in Vermont.

Today, Matthew works with an international development team to expand that application into an AI-powered therapeutic agent—one that supports healthy behaviors and reinforces them through aligned incentives.

The arc is not accidental.

It is the outcome of a system that refuses to separate recovery from creativity, or healing from ambition.

Measuring Success by Transformation

The Evergreen Fund does not measure success solely by abstinence, compliance, or program completion.

Success is measured by transformation:

• From dependency to self-direction

• From isolation to contribution

• From survival to innovation

Matthew’s journey—from the tents of Los Angeles to the stages of international hackathons—illustrates what becomes possible when recovery is paired with opportunity, and when entrepreneurship is treated not as a luxury, but as a lifeline.

Recovery, when done right, doesn’t just save lives.

It builds them and then the return on investment is when Matthew and the other people the Evergreen Fund supports pay it forward! They become unlikely heroes in our communities.