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W
e’ve had a recovery community in Kingston RISE (Recovery
Initiative Social Enterprise) since 2011. It has touched about
200 people – some a little, some a lot – supported by two
employees and half a dozen volunteers. Each year we’ve cost
less to run than it costs to put one person through treatment.
So what does delivery look like for a recovery community? The bread and
butter is our community café, where we meet regulars and new people. We check
in together at the start of the week and check out at the end. We take care of
each other. But we’ve done much more: we’ve acted in plays, played in a band,
attended lots of festivals, and walked endlessly in the Surrey Hills. We’ve done
yoga, mindfulness, three principles, and dug an allotment. We learned from each
other at RISE College – and we’ve had fun.
People come and they go, but that’s OK. We’re not here to keep people
locked into a service; we’re here to help people get their lives back. Quite a few
of them we don’t see so much now because they’ve got jobs. We have
measured our effectiveness using a tool by Martin Webber from the Institute of
Psychiatry, which captures people’s connectedness and their access to
resources, before and after. The difference can be significant. But the real
measure is in how people behave – they get lively again. It’s in their faces, in
their voices, when they spark with each other, and when they laugh. What are
the ideas that have led us on this journey?
MODERNITY AND AUSTERITY
The modern world has brought us many benefits. We are, as a society,
economically better off than the generations of our parents and grandparents. In
general, life is easier. However, the modern world has brought us challenges not
faced by previous generations, and the symptoms are evident almost everywhere.
Obesity, malnutrition, mental illness, domestic violence and addiction are rife. The
demise of extended families and the loss of a sense of community have left a
significant proportion of society in desperate isolation. These symptoms can
often strike together.
Today, faced with any kind of social problem, including the ones above, we
typically look to government and corporations for answers. We cannot get those
answers unless they are first monetarised, and ‘solutions’ competed and
procured. Efficient processes, selection criteria and measurement become
paramount; people secondary. Citizens have been repositioned as ‘consumers’,
either in credit (as purchasers of products) or in deficit (as service users). A
‘parent-child’ relationship has been set up between those in authority and ‘needy’
consumers of services – with professionals sandwiched uneasily in between. It is
possible today to believe that in the eyes of government, communities are
problems to be solved.
Most recently, these issues have become worse because the funding for
these ‘top down’ services has started to become scarce. Whether you believe in
the austerity narrative or not, the reality for a substantial part of society – the
most vulnerable – typically with a combination of issues such as homelessness,
mental illness, addiction, poor physical health, and (underlying all) poverty, is
that practical help is becoming harder and harder to find from traditional
sources. For this section of community it’s possible to see that ‘everyone’s in
recovery from something’.
It’s clear we need answers – and it’s also clear the current paradigm doesn’t
deliver them. So what are we to do?
RESILIENT COMMUNITIES
In the recovery movement we are clear that the answers lie in each other, in
community, so it is natural that we should look inside ourselves and to each
other for answers. Answer number one is that the solution involves reinstating
our notions of community. As Cormac Russell, of the Asset Based Community
Development Institute, said: ‘There are some things community is best placed
to do; but we’ve forgotten
how to do it. Government
needs to get out of the way
and let us do it. And for
things community can’t do;
help them.’
Our notions of community
will not, of course, spring into
being at once after a 60-year
lapse. We need to start by
building communities that
come together over pressing
issues. Later, when we are
strong, resilient and
mobilised in a variety of ways,
the chance will be there to
join these communities
together. Recovery communities have lessons for the
community in general today, about how the
cohesiveness we get from shared experience can
translate into positive real outcomes that we achieve
together. We are not passive, inert consumers of
services; we can do things for ourselves. And that
makes us, individually and collectively, stronger. We’re
collaborating with Martha Earley, head of Kingston
Council’s Equalities, Community and Engagement
Team (ECET) to deliver community engagement and
change, both within the council and to community
groups using our approach and tools.
So how do we find the resources to deliver
recovery today? Well, in a world where money is
scarce, we use what is to hand that does not involve
cash and profits. We are, all of us, endowed with an
abundance of gifts – assets. These are the things we
know how to do, or the things people we know can
do. We’ve just forgotten to look for them, because we
Forget looking to
government and
corporations for
answers to social
problems. The answers
lie in harnessing the
strength within our
recovery community,
say
Tony Williams
and
Mario Sobczak
of
Kingston RISE
14 |
drinkanddrugsnews
| September 2014
Recovery |
Communities
www.drinkanddrugsnews.com
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