Scranton City Hall hosted a meeting on Tuesday where city leaders and local health organizations discussed a possible community-wide public-health pilot for problem gambling. The proposal would be built around Almond Digital Health’s education-and-prevention model.
According to WVIA, Mayor Paige Cognetti said the city could be a useful test bed for early intervention, awareness and support services. She also said Scranton was the right size for the work, small enough for a compact group of collaborators and big enough to make an impact as a city of about 80,000 people and a region of 600,000.
Kevin Winters, Almond’s founder and chief executive, said the company wants to push the response upstream. Treatment and recovery remain important, he said, but education and prevention matter just as much. Almond is not anti-gambling, he said, and aims to help people build healthy habits, such as gambling within their means or taking a break when betting starts to affect life.
Winters said Almond has received state funding to roll out its program to colleges, universities, employers, health plans and people seeking help in specialized clinical settings. He described the work as part of a wider public-health ecosystem that also includes awareness campaigns and general messaging.
He said early intervention needs to happen at several levels and for different age groups, including in primary care offices and through pediatricians. Winters said ages 13 to 18 is a critical intervention point, because many young people do not think of online sports betting as traditional gambling, even though bets can be placed in real time on foul shots or pitches during a game. He also said 70% to 80% of problem-gambling funding usually goes to adult services.
Winters pointed to Pennsylvania Youth Survey data. The 2023 survey was a voluntary, anonymous, biennial poll of students in grades 6, 8, 10 and 12, reported in aggregate. It produced 262,535 valid responses from 1,048 participating schools out of 1,953 eligible, and Winters cited it in saying that more than 20% of Pennsylvania students in those grades have gambled at some point in their lives.
Scranton School District Superintendent Erin Keating said the district’s perspective includes teaching students about digital health and safety, including online gambling. She said online algorithms are built to hit the brain’s reward system and that staff need professional development so they can pass those lessons on to students. Almond has also developed a curriculum for K-12 students.
Kyle Popish, founder of WholePath Wellness, said he treats people ages 14 to 70 and was excited by the conversation. He proposed more group support meetings in the area, where the story said there are only two Gamblers Anonymous meetings, one Sundays from 5:30 to 7 p.m. at St. Matthew’s United Evangelical Church in Scranton and one Wednesdays at 7 p.m. at Waverly United Methodist Church.
The discussion came against a broader shift in Pennsylvania gambling policy. After the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a 1992 federal law that had prohibited state-approved sports gambling, Pennsylvania legalized online gambling in Act 42 on Oct. 30, 2017, and online sports betting followed in May 2019.
State training materials from February 2025 describe a public-health approach as a partnership-driven effort that identifies risk and protective factors, pilots equitable prevention strategies and scales effective ones. In March, the Pennsylvania Gaming Control Board, the Department of Drug and Alcohol Programs, the Pennsylvania Lottery and the Council on Compulsive Gambling of Pennsylvania marked Problem Gambling Awareness Month to educate people about warning signs, treatment options and recovery resources.
