In North Carolina, Option B is unlocked by a documented planning process.

Under the North Carolina Memorandum of Agreement, a county can spend its opioid settlement share on the short list of strategies in Exhibit A at any time. Reaching the longer Exhibit B list means first completing the collaborative strategic planning process set out in Exhibit C. That means a real multi-sector process, plus a written record of it that goes to your board and then to the state.

That is the meeting Agora was built to run, and the record it was built to leave behind. The planning workbook is built and counties are using it today. MOA mode, the compliance overlay described further down this page, is still in development.

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Illustration: a routed path across contour terrain. No participant data.

The requirement, in plain terms

Every local government receiving settlement funds under the NC MOA spends them under Option A, Option B, or both. The difference between the two options is a planning process.

Option A: spend from the short list

Fund one or more strategies from Exhibit A, the shorter pre-authorized list of high-impact strategies. No planning process is required first.

Collaborative planning is still encouraged, and it is itself something settlement funds may pay for. It is simply not a condition of spending under Option A.

Option B: unlock the long list by planning first

Exhibit B is the full range of strategies from the national settlements, across six broad categories: treatment for opioid use disorder, support for people in treatment and recovery, the needs of criminal-justice-involved people, the needs of pregnant and parenting people and their families, prevention of over-prescribing and misuse, and prevention of overdose deaths and other harms.

Before authorizing an Exhibit B strategy, a local government completes the collaborative strategic planning process described in Exhibit C, drafts a report and recommendations containing everything in Exhibit C’s right-hand column, presents it to the governing body, and submits it to CORE-NC within 90 days of that presentation.

note the recommendations are non-binding

Exhibit C is not a form.

It is fourteen named activities, each with a result that has to appear in the report. The order is load-bearing: several of them take another as their input.

AEngage diverse stakeholders throughout the process, meaning the ten categories below rather than a general invitation.
BDesignate a facilitator for the process. A trained, neutral one is what the MOA points at.
CBuild on prior or concurrent planning that addresses addiction, drug misuse or overdose, including community health assessments.
DAgree on a shared vision for positive community change.
EIdentify one or more population-level key indicators to gauge progress against that vision.
FIdentify and explore root causes, using quantitative data alongside community voices and the accounts of people with lived experience.
GIdentify and evaluate potential strategies, named by their letter or number in Exhibit A or Exhibit B, against the available evidence.

HSurvey the existing programs and services addressing the same issues, and identify the gaps and shortcomings.
IPrioritize strategies, weighing the shared vision, the root causes, the evaluation of each strategy, and the gap analysis.
JSet goals and an evaluation plan for each strategy: at least one process measure, one quality measure, and one outcome measure.
KConsider ways to align strategies: braided funding, regional solutions, partnerships.
LIdentify the organizations responsible for implementing each strategy, and the resources they will need.
MDevelop a budget and a timeline for each strategy.
NOffer recommendations to the local governing body.

“Diverse stakeholders” is not left to judgement either. Exhibit C itemizes ten categories, and the report has to say who was involved and how.

Local officials Healthcare providers Social service providers Education and employment Payers and funders Law enforcement and corrections Employers Community groups Lived experience Reflecting community diversity

And it does not end at the report.

90 daysTo submit the report and recommendations to CORE-NC after presenting them to the governing body. They are published on the state’s dashboards.
Year oneFollowing presentation, the governing body may authorize spending on any Exhibit A or Exhibit B strategy.
Years 2–4It may authorize any Exhibit A strategy, plus any Exhibit B strategy the report recommended or the body authorized during year one.
Every 4 yearsThe planning process has to be repeated to keep funding any Exhibit B strategy, and repeated again before adding a new one.
~18 yearsSettlement payments run into the late 2030s. The documentation obligation runs with them.

The state is requiring exactly the meeting Agora is built to run.

It has to be documented to a standard that flip charts and one person’s memory of the room cannot meet. Then documented again every four years, for as long as the payments last.

Two layers: the workbook that exists, and the compliance overlay being built

Which is which matters more here than anywhere else on this site. A county with a planning session on the calendar this quarter needs to know what it can lean on this quarter.

The planning workbook, which is built

The Exhibit C process is modeled step by step, A through N: convening and the facilitator, the planning already underway, shared vision and key indicators, root causes, strategy identification and evaluation, the survey of existing efforts and the gaps in them, prioritization, goals and measures, alignment, implementing organizations, budgets and timelines, and the recommendations themselves.

Step ordering and completeness are validated rather than assumed, and the stakeholder categories Exhibit C names are tracked as a roster rather than remembered.

The Report & Recommendations rides the same pipeline as every other output on the platform:

Draft In review Approved

No document leaves the system without a named person releasing it.

A county can run its Exhibit C process on the workbook today. MOA mode arrives as an overlay on this same structure. It does not replace the workbook, and it is not a reason to wait.

MOA mode, which is still in development

When the organizer selects the North Carolina settlement meeting type, a compliance overlay is added to the live event.

required outcomesEach Exhibit C element is injected into the event as a required outcome, with a live status and links to the transcript spans standing as evidence for it.
sector coverageCoverage across the ten stakeholder categories is watched while the room is still running. No lived-experience voice has spoken on strategy selection in 25 minutes is an alert to the facilitator, not a finding in a post-mortem.
strategy mappingProposed strategies are mapped against Exhibit B categories as they are raised, each with a confidence level. Low confidence renders as needs review, and never as settled.
sequencingThe overlay holds Exhibit C’s own order: root causes before strategies are evaluated, the survey of existing efforts and its gaps before prioritization, prioritization before goals and measures, recommendations last.

The output is the Exhibit C Process Documentation Report: the attendance and sector roster, a narrative of the process step by step, the root-cause, existing-effort and gap evidence with citations back to the transcript, the strategies mapped to Exhibit B with their rationale and measures, whatever is still outstanding, and a register of dissent.

On the register of dissent

That last one is ours rather than the MOA’s. A record in which everyone agreed about everything is not evidence of a collaborative process. It is evidence of a process that surfaced nothing. Disagreement, recorded and attributed, is what a genuine one leaves behind, and it is the part a reader can tell was not staged.

Exhibit C rarely finishes in one meeting

Fourteen activities, ten stakeholder categories, and a budget and timeline for every strategy. Counties run this across three, four, six sessions over several months, usually without the same people in the room each time.

A Planning Series chains events together so the state of the process belongs to the series rather than to any one meeting. Checklist status, the evidence gathered against each element, and the outcome trajectories all persist across sessions. Session three opens exactly where session two closed, with whatever is still outstanding at the top of it.

It is also what a county reopens in year four, when the process has to be repeated to keep funding an Exhibit B strategy. The previous cycle becomes a starting point instead of an archive.

An illustration: one series, three sessions

Session oneStakeholders convened and the sector roster opened; shared vision agreed; key indicators chosen. Elements A to E carry evidence.
Session twoRoot causes explored, strategies identified against Exhibit A and Exhibit B. F and G evidenced, and the roster shows no employer voice yet.
Session threeOpens on exactly what was outstanding: the survey of existing efforts, prioritization, goals and measures, with session two’s evidence already attached to it.

Nothing is re-established at the start of a session that was already established in the one before it.

The chaining rides the longitudinal layer, which is built and running today. What is still in development is Planning Series itself, meaning the series-level compliance state that sits on top of that layer.

Three limits, stated up front

ingested, not paraphrased
Element definitions load from the actual MOA and Exhibit C text, and a person reviews them before they are used. What the overlay checks against is the document, not our summary of it.
named approval
Nothing exports without a named human approval record attached to it. There is no path through this system that produces a filed document on its own.
not legal advice
This is process documentation support. Convocant does not practice law and does not certify anyone’s compliance. The county owns its compliance judgment, and its counsel owns the review.

North Carolina is one instance of a wider pattern

Settlement funds, federal grants and state block grants increasingly attach the same condition to the money: a planning process that is documented, inclusive, and demonstrably real.

A framework is configuration rather than a product

MOA mode is the template for that whole class of requirement. Another framework, with a different exhibit, a different stakeholder list and a different report format, is configuration against the same engine: required outcomes, linked evidence, coverage monitoring, protected sequencing, and a human-gated report at the end. It does not fork the platform and it is not a second thing to buy.

The relationship outlives the report

The same data that documents the process becomes commitment tracking afterwards, with owners, due dates and completion by sector. It then becomes part of the community’s longitudinal record, which is what a county draws on the next time somebody asks what has actually changed since the first planning session.

How the record compounds The portfolio and the roadmap

Planning an Exhibit C process?

Bring us the session already on your calendar, with your sectors, your agenda and your reporting deadline. A working session against a real meeting is the fastest way to find out whether this fits.

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