In an earlier post, I belatedly celebrated (I had missed the day) the first birthday of our Recovery Voices website. However, I got things wrong. I recently realised that we had actually celebrated the date that I started loading content onto the website. Today is the first anniversary of when we officially launched the website. We had spent six months preparatory work, including interviewing a number of people in recovery, before the launch.
In the past ‘celebratory’ blog, I described how Wulf Livingston, from North Wales, and I developed our project. I also outlined our aims and referred to each of our Recovery Voices contributors. We have been thrilled that each of these Voices have contributed to our project, some with more than one interview. Wulf and I are very grateful to Ash Whitney for developing such a cool website.
The website now has just under 400 pages of content. In addition, our Recovery Voices and Recovery Themes YouTube channels between them contain over 500 film clips from our interviews. Check out the people we have interviewed here and the recovery communities for which we have created website pages (ARC Fitness pages to come later).
I thought I’d include a list of the ten most viewed blog posts during the past year, shown in reverse order. Of course, some of these blog posts have been on the website far longer than those that have recently been posted on the website.
10. Remembering My Friend Bradley Miah-Phillips RIP I reflect on the extraordinary life of one of the storytellers from my eBook Our Recovery Stories: Journeys from Drug and Alcohol Addiction. (29 November 2023)
9. Life After Prison: David Higham An awesome six-minute film telling the story of the Founder of The Well Communities, an inspiring recovery community located in Cumbria and North Lancashire. (6 November 2023)
8. Ten Most Viewed Posts, 2023 Headed by a blog post about my interview with Dr. David McCartney, Founder of Lothians and Edinburgh Abstinence Programme (LEAP). (31 December 2023)
7. Visiting ARC Fitness Recovery Community, Part 1 An amazing first day in Derry/Londonderry visiting Gary Rutherford, Founder of ARC, and his team. (15 May 2024)
6. 37th Anniversary: John Crace Celebrating the recovery from heroin addiction of one of my favourite journalists, John Crace, the parliamentary sketch writer for The Guardian. (12 March 2024)
5. Theme Film favourites: Huseyin Djemil Three of my favourite Theme clips from my interviews with Huseyin that relate to the nature of recovery and the voices of recovering people. (2 January 2024)
4. Shame Three film clips about shame from an interview with Dr. David McCartney, one in which he describes how shame was part of a major epiphany in his life. (18 September 2024)
3. Reflecting on 12 Principle of Indigenous Healing After a great deal of reading about the healing of trauma and intergenerational trauma, I summarised what I considered to be 12 principles of healing, which are relevant to Aboriginal people here in Australia and other Indigenous peoples around the world. (1 January 2024)
2. Reflections on, and Quotes from, Noreen Oliver MBE (RIP) I refer to the evaluation of the structured day care programme at Noreen’s Burton Addiction Centre (BAC)—later to become The BAC O’Connor Centre–that my Wired In colleagues and I conducted back in 2004. (21 December 2023)
1. An Extraordinary Recovery Champion: Noreen Oliver RIP Words from Kendra Gray, CEO of The BAC O’Connor Centre, after the passing of my good friend and inspirational figure Noreen Oliver MBE, along with some of my memories of interacting with Noreen. (20 December 2023)
It says a lot about the impact and inspiration of much loved Noreen Oliver that she tops our list in positions one and two. I really felt the love and strong feelings of loss for Noreen when I visited The BAC O’Connor Centre this year. I too really miss her.
I hope you have enjoyed our content over the past year. Please tell your friends about Recovery Voices.