The Targeted Generation: How Martine Helou-Allen Is Fighting Addiction Before It Starts

Nine out of ten adult addictions began in the middle school years. That single statistic is the reason Martine Helou-Allen gets out of bed every morning — and it's the reason she rarely goes to sleep without her phone buzzing with a text from a teenager who needs her.

Martine is the Executive Director and CEO of RIZE Prevention, a public health nonprofit she built from the ground up and formally launched in June 2021. The organization exists to stop addiction before it starts in youth ages 12 to 25 — through education, early intervention, coaching, and counseling. But ask Martine what she actually does for a living, and the answer isn't "run a nonprofit."

"It is my life and it's my life's work, because essentially it's a ministry. I'm never off, because I'm always in the presence of my Lord, who wants this ministry to continue to be successful."

That distinction — ministry, not just mission — shapes everything downstream: how RIZE Prevention spends its donors' money, how Martine hires and lets go of staff, and even how she plans a gala.

The Statistic Nobody Wants to Believe

Helou-Allen is blunt about the scale of what her organization faces. "They are being targeted to be the most addicted generation," she says of today's youth — not because rates are technically rising in every dataset, but because of what she and her team see on the ground. RiZE Prevention works with young people from age 12 to 25, a range most people don't realize is the actual window of vulnerability. Miss the intervention in middle school, and the same story often repeats in high school. Miss it there, and it follows a young adult to college, where accountability disappears and access multiplies.

That is the gap RIZE Prevention exists to close — not after addiction takes hold, but before it ever gets a foothold.

Guardrails Are Scripture

Ask Helou-Allen how she leads, and she doesn't reach for a management framework. She reaches for the Bible.

"My guardrails are scripture. What it says in scripture — that's what I do in my company, from the financial side of reporting, to how I spend money and steward our donations, to how I treat my employees."

Her anchor verse is Romans 12:2, which she calls "the formula for life and for living life well." In public and charter schools, RIZE Prevention isn't permitted to proselytize — and Helou-Allen is at peace with that boundary. But she's noticed something she didn't expect: students consistently perceive the faith underneath the program anyway. "They will come up to us and start the conversation about faith," she says. "They know we're Christian." The truth RIZE Prevention teaches doesn't need a label to be recognized.

The Decision That Almost Didn't Happen

Early in RIZE Prevention's life, Helou-Allen faced an opportunity that looked, by every worldly metric, like a win. The money was substantial. The exposure would have been significant. And she said no.

God spoke very clearly through his spirit to me about opportunities that I should not pursue, because they were not in alignment with who we are at RIZE Prevention. The money was great. It looked extremely lucrative. But I knew in my heart it would compromise our ability to do the things we do the way we do them."

That single decision, made almost entirely on faith with no guarantee of what would replace the lost opportunity, became the foundation the rest of the organization was built on. Helou-Allen credits the late Charles Stanley, one of her mentors, with the framework that carried her through it: "Obey the Lord and leave all the consequences to him." She lives by that line daily. "If you're going to claim that the Lord is sovereign," she says, "then he is sovereign in all things — in the great things, and in the things that don't manifest, whether that's provision or protection.

The Gala With Two Drink Tickets

The tension between faith and worldly business practice doesn't just show up in the big, foundational decisions — it shows up in the details. When Helou-Allen's team began planning RIZE Prevention's inaugural gala, they ran into an obvious problem: adults expect alcohol at a gala, and adults have every right to drink. But RIZE Prevention exists to prevent substance abuse. Putting an open bar at the center of the event felt like a contradiction Helou-Allen couldn't ignore.

So she prayed about it. "I said, God, help me find a way to be faithful to you in the behaviors I'm promoting through this event, while also understanding that people have the right to drink," she recalls. The answer came through logistics: a venue with a separate room for the bar, tucked away from the main event space, and a strict two-drink-ticket limit per guest.

Everybody's like, oh man, people are not going to have fun. Yes they will. Because our message is more important than how many drinks they get to have.

The gala became, in Helou-Allen's words, the proof point of everything RIZE Prevention stands for — a room full of donors, families, and former clients who left not just entertained, but changed.

Generosity That Doesn't Clock Out

RIZE Prevention charges nothing for its programs, coaching, or counseling. And Helou-Allen's own generosity doesn't end when the workday does. After a recent talk to psychology classes at a technical school, a group of young women approached her in tears — one struggling with alcohol, another with OxyContin, another with marijuana. Several had been in therapy for years but told Helou-Allen it was the first time they'd heard the truth spoken plainly. They asked her to keep meeting with them. She now leads that group weekly, unpaid, long after her official workday ends.

If the Lord did not want me to pour into them, then he would not have convicted their hearts to come up to me afterward and ask for that.

Two Questions Worth Answering First

For leaders early in their journey — before the scar tissue of hard-won business lessons has formed — Helou-Allen offers a place to start that has nothing to do with strategy.

"The two most important questions in life we have to answer before we die if we want stability, peace, joy, and true success are: Who am I, and Why am I here? Those speak to your identity and your purpose. Since we did not create ourselves, those answers are only found in God."

Get those answers settled in Christ first, she says, and the decisions that used to feel impossible — walking away from lucrative deals, restructuring a gala, letting go of the wrong hire — become simply what obedience looks like that day.

An Invitation, Not Just an Interview

Helou-Allen isn't looking to be replicated — she knows there's no second Martine. But she is looking for partners: leaders with knowledge, connection to the Spirit, and a passion for people who are being called but haven't yet found the courage to answer. She's hoping to take the message she's built at RIZE Prevention nationwide, and she's asking the Kingdom Factor community to help light that fire in the next generation of leaders who don't yet know how to work out their calling.

If you're one of them — if you've sensed the nudge toward a mission bigger than quarterly numbers — Helou-Allen's story is proof of what happens when you stop asking what the market will reward and start asking what the Lord requires. Start there. The rest, as she puts it, he will bring to fruition.