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CELEBRATING
RECOVERY IN KENT
The first Medway recovery festival organised by service
user groups and local provider KCA celebrated recovery
in the local community. DDN joined the celebrations
THE BRAINCHILD of the Medway service user groups, the Medway recovery
festival was organised by local service users alongside Peter Hawley, KCA service
user representative, and his team of volunteers.
‘It’s our privilege to help someone into recovery’, said new KCA chief
executive Ryan Campbell, explaining that he was in recovery himself. ‘Recovery
is about more than treatment, it’s more than stopping using, it’s about
changing a whole lifestyle, being a good parent, moving into employment, and
becoming a valued member of society.’
The one-day event celebrated the achievements of those in recovery in the
Medway, with more than 100 people’s hard work and determination recognised
through an awards ceremony. The festival was attended by local director of
public health Dr Alison Barnett, and MP for Chatham and Aylesford, Tracey
Crouch – also chair of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Alcohol. In a short
speech, Crouch said how hearing the recovery stories of people at the festival
made her more passionate about campaigning for better treatment and
explained that she had been moved to lobby parliament for improved alcohol
services following a friend’s experiences of being unable to get the help she
needed for her alcoholic partner.
‘Services need to be different for everyone – we need to offer both residential
and community treatment,’ she said. A prominent supporter of minimum unit
pricing, Crouch added that it was necessary to change society's attitude to
drinking and deal with the easy availability of cheap alcohol.
The focus of the day however wasn’t politicians, treatment providers or
healthcare professionals, but rather an opportunity to celebrate recovery and
what it meant to the individuals concerned. This was highlighted by three very
different service users telling their inspirational personal stories and reading
their own poems.
Guests also heard from Alistair Sinclair from the UKRF and Paula from the
Kingston RISE peer support group about building on people’s assets to create a
recovery community. ColmWhitty and Geoff Wheeler from Air Football then
explained the work they did in partnership with KCA to take individuals beyond
treatment and help them in the later stages of their recovery.
Event organiser Peter Hawley summed up the feeling in the room by saying
that only five years ago there had been just a handful of individuals in Medway in
recovery. Now events like this were possible and recovery was visible everywhere.
Group shot: KCA chief executive Ryan Campbell celebrates with event
organisers and award winners
June 2013 |
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Recovery |
Communities
ential
between professionals and the people they serve. If we get it wrong then we
may see the post-war welfare state dismantled without sustainable
alternatives, while citizens – especially those who are poor and powerless –
are left to fend for themselves.’
If you’d like see a real attempt at a bottom-up approach to co-production you
could start small (but beautifully formed) and pay a visit to the Recovery Initiative
Social Enterprise (RISE) in Kingston-Upon-Thames. This community-led enterprise
has been quietly developing an approach to co-production that may well see
them established as the backbone to a recovery revolution in Kingston.
I attended a RISE co-production workshop last month and heard how they
were working on equal terms with local services, academics, clinicians and the
community to establish something new – an integrated community-led model
which will bring recovery, asset-based community development and co-production
principles together to create RISE Community CONNECT, its explicit aim being to
‘tackle poverty and inequality through access to community and education’.
As Elvis Langley, an independent consultant who has been involved with
RISE since its beginning said at the workshop, ‘Service user involvement is
not co-production, consultation is not engagement. Co-production provides
opportunities for personal growth and development to people, so that they are
treated as assets, not burdens on an over-stretched system.’
We live in interesting times. The demands on the welfare state are not
going to diminish and it will increasingly struggle to provide care to those in
need ‘from the cradle to the grave’. As austerity continues to bite we are faced
with a stark choice – we can sit and agree that times are awful and ‘somebody
should do something about it’ or we can look to the neglected ‘core economy’
– our community – and begin to rebuild and recover.
Another report from NESTA and Nef,
Public services inside out
, published in
2010, outlined a co-production framework with the following key characteristics –
recognising people as assets, building on people’s existing capabilities,
promoting mutuality and reciprocity, developing peer support networks, breaking
down barriers between professionals and recipients and facilitating rather than
delivering. Recovery in the community has been developing within this framework
for quite some time. Perhaps it’s time for services to catch up?
DDN