In an earlier blog post, my colleague Wulf Livingston outlined the talk he gave at the ARC Fitness 2024 Recovery in Motion Conference. ARC Fitness have now posted the conference videos on their YouTube channel. You can link to the video of Wulf’s talk at the bottom of this page. Here is Wulf’s description of an interesting oxymoron—you can’t commission recovery.
‘And I’ve come to understand, and this is probably one of the key learnings for me over a very long time, I’ve come to understand the idea of commissioning recovery is an oxymoron. And for anyone who’s not quite sure what the word oxymoron means, it’s when you stick two words together that can’t be put together and don’t make any sense and can’t join them up. So in other words it’s not possible to really commission recovery. Yes?
And why is it not possible to really commission recovery? Because commissioning recovery and recovery communities has some of all these really important characteristics. It needs individuals, really special individuals, champions, leaders, and I’ve come across a number of these over the last 20 or 30 years. And it’s not possible for someone in the government to go and find a Gary or buy a Gary before a Gary exists. It just can’t happen.
A recovery community is made of a set of people that have got some shared passion, some shared beliefs, some shared journeys, and again you can’t just… it’s either there or it’s not there. So you can foster it and you can nurture it, but you can’t buy it off the shelf. The individuals are different.
The community that makes it up is different. The families and friends that join in are different and they’re not the same in each different area. So it’s not possible. You can put a handbook out and go, this is how we provide a methadone service and you can make it the same in every single area. For recovery communities, because we have these different things, we can’t do it.
And then the magic, and I’m going to talk about the magic in a little bit more, the magic is this business that someone who’s quite well known in recovery academia, David Best, talks about the contagion, the doughnut effect. So recovery breeds recovery and it spreads recovery, and you start with two people in the room and it becomes ten people in the room, and they become 30 or 50 or 100. And again, you’re not commissioning or designing a service where all those people are going to come to the door to start with. They won’t come until the bubble comes. So it’s very, very interesting.
And then of course lastly, you can’t do it off-the-shelf manual because it’s always local. So ARC here started with fitness, it’s all about fitness. Where I am and the recovery community I’m involved, it has three elements. It has residential, it has a growing and a high street cafe arm, and it has a going up the hill and mountains arms. We can’t go up the hills and mountains if you don’t live next to the hills and mountains, and so on and so forth. And we can’t, in our recovery community, as much as any of us might or might not want to, we can’t do ice skating. It’s 56 miles, 60 miles away.
And so you do what’s in your community, you do what resources are available to you. So again, it can’t come off the shelf.’
