I can’t believe that I missed the 1st birthday of Recovery Voices last week. Mind you, my colleague Wulf Livingston missed the date as well. I put it down to the fact that we are both very busy, not that we are losing our marbles.
So we launched Recovery Voices on 8 September 2023, about a year after I visited Wulf and his lovely wife Melanie in North Wales. During that visit, Wulf introduced me to North Wales Recovery Communities (NWRC) in Bangor and we began to work up the idea of developing a new web-based initiative called Recovery Voices. I got in touch with Ash Whitney of Cilfrew in South Wales, who has been building websites for me since 2000, and he agreed to build us a new website.
The Recovery Voices project was developed in order to capture conversations about what works in supporting recovery from addiction, and in the development of peer-led recovery communities, from a range of individuals with lived experience, as well as friends of recovery. We highlight common messages and learning that comes from these messages.
We intend this website to be an education and information resource for people working with, and supporting, recovering people and peer-led recovery communities, as well as for recovering people themselves. We also want to celebrate the lives and achievements of recovering people and peer-led recovery communities. You can learn more about the Why, the What and the How relating to our project in this section. Please check out Wulf and myself.
To date, we have conducted 15 interviews using Zoom (David) or Microsoft Teams (Wulf) and I have edited these interviews into a series of longer film clips (please see the People pages) or shorter ones (Themes or Stories), and have written accompanying summaries. We have two YouTube channels containing a multitude of clips, Recovery Voices and Recovery Themes). The people we have interviewed are:
Huseyin Djemil, Founder of Towards Recovery
James Deakin, Founder of North Wales Recovery Communities (NWRC)
Dr. David McCartney, Founder of Lothians and Edinburgh Abstinence Programme (LEAP)
Professor Wendy Dossett, Chester Studies of Addiction, Recovery & Spirituality Group
Marcus Fair, Founder of Eternal Media
Rhoda Emlyn-Jones OBE, Founder of Option 2 Family Service
Dr. Tim Leighton, Independent Consultant and leading educator in the addiction field
Gary Rutherford, Founder of ARC Fitness
Professor Wulf Livingston, Co-Founder of Recovery Voices
We have had some wonderful feedback over the past year and this has been very special. Thank you to all those concerned. We would like to ask all of you if you can spread the word about our project, the website and our YouTube channels. We want to continually increase our visitor number so that the work of our interviewees can have a wider impact. Many thanks in advance.