A key aim of our Recovery Voices project is to highlight the power of recovery communities in helping people recover from addiction. In the YouTube playlist below, you can view three films from Wulf’s Voices conversation with David Best that focus on the nature of recovery communities.
Nature of Recovery Communities [6’53”]
David summarises the evidence from research about what is important for recovery: jobs, friends and houses, or somewhere to live, someone to love, and something to do. When he and his colleagues run their Inclusive Recovery Cities workshops, they encourage individuals and groups to engage with four quadrants: sport, art and recreation; employment, training and education; volunteering and community involvement, and mutual aid and recovery groups. They argue for involvement in at least one item of each of these four sectors.
Wulf says you cannot prescribe fixed things for a recovery initiative, like you can for a methadone clinic, but you need to have things that ensure that people help other people, and that address practical issues that people have, such as housing and jobs. You also can’t commission recovery…. But you can commission many of the conditions that allow recovery to flourish.
A wide variety of activities can be arranged in a central hub that can facilitate recovery. It’s important to bring in outside organisations that have nothing to do with recovery, and also get people out of their normal environment. In the early days of recovery, it is good to spend a good deal of time with other people in recovery. However, if someone several years down the line has no social networks outside their recovery world, then something has gone badly wrong.