One of the things that I have always appreciated about recovery communities is that their positive impact can go beyond the individuals within the community. And I don’t just mean their family members, which is special in its own right. Going right back to an initial evaluation that my Wired In colleagues and I conducted with Burton Addiction Centre (now BAC O’Connor) in 2004, to what I have seen going on at North Wales Recovery Communities (NWRC), ARC Fitness, and Eternal Media in the last few years, I have seen how recovery communities can impact positively on their wider local community. The three films from Wulf’s conversation with David Best in the YouTube Playlist below focus on this issue:
Beyond the Individual [7’31”]
David mentions William White quoting two small qualitative studies that showed when fathers achieved sustainable recovery, their sons had better scholastic engagement, attendance and milestone achievement. David thinks that we make a mistake if we use an outcome metric that only focuses on the individual; we must consider the wider impact of a person’s recovery.
In his book The Great American City, Robert Sampson uses the term collective efficacy, which refers to two things. One is social cohesion in communities, and the second is shared expectations about the likelihood of your neighbours getting involved in pro-social activities, like stopping somebody graffitiing. David wants to use collective efficacy as the outcomes and evaluation metric for Inclusive Recovery Cities.
Much of this Recovery Voices Conversation has been about challenging orthodoxy, or reclaiming some orthodoxy. David describes two important questions about recovery communities or groups: Can the connectedness of recovery communities inspire similar changes more broadly across the wider community? Can they be the glue or the inspiration for re-engaging a range of excluded and marginalised groups and individuals? As far as David, Wulf and I are concerned, the answer is a resounding ‘YES!’