David Best is one of the United Kingdom’s (UK’s), if not global, leading authorities on community-based recovery. For this reason, it is a real pleasure for David Clark and I to have captured a conversation with him. My conversation with David Best marks the first of a new set of films for the Recovery Voices website for 2025. It is a rich conveying of David’s involvement in various organisations and recovery initiatives, through which we have seized lots of his understanding about what is recovery and how it works, especially within communities.
I have known David for 15 years, since we were both among the initial directors of The Recovery Academy. This group which functioned between 2010 and 2013, included two of those we have already interviewed: David McCartney and Tim Leighton. It was a group committed to developing the knowledge about recovery (transformation in individuals and communities) to help shape policy and practice. The Recovery Academy was among one of several groups that shaped the formative years of a ‘recovery movement’ in the UK. That is not only captured within this interview, but also within my interview with Tim, but also David Clark’s interview with me.
David Best successfully brought many of us in the community together to contribute to Jeffrey Roth and his 2013 book Addiction and Recovery in the UK. This text captured a lot of the thinking of the time and is described by the publishers as capturing … the essence of the emerging addictions recovery movement and in particular the emerging evidence base that had been gathered around the umbrella of the Recovery Academy UK.
What strikes me about that period, and still resonates today, is how often those articulating for the value of recovery, the need for it to be peer- and community-centred, and its understanding of the fundamental influence of social inequality on substance use and by consequence the role of social change in personal growth. David’s work as reflected in this interview captures the essence of much of this radical and often anti-(treatment) establishment.
In my conversation with David Best, he begins by outlining what it is about recovery, the hope and potential of change that so enraptured him, for it to become the cornerstone of the last 15 or more years of his working life. We then explored some of the influential moments in what he describes as his ‘uncomfortable journey’. This includes early UK activities, the stark difference in approaches from a Scottish and an English/Westminster Government, a move to Australia, and inspiration from the US.
David then explores how he successful set about developing measures for recovery and recovery capital. The conversation concludes with discussions about communities, the role of peers, the social building blocks of change, and what David refers to as the ‘hub and spoke’ of a recovery community.
More recently David’s work has become shaped through his support of the development of the College of Lived Experience Recovery Organisations (CLERO). He continues to co-ordinate and champion the recovery cause. In his most recent project on Inclusive Recovery Cities, he continues to articulate the potential of recovery as a social movement, and the important notion that what is good for those in recovery is in fact good for all of us.
There is a resonance through our conversation and David’s work that what recovery does at its heart is to transform. It does this through contagion, i.e. it spreads from one person to another, from one community to another. Importantly, the transformation is not only for those recovering from difficult experiences of alcohol and drug use, but for communities and society as a whole. The simple essence is that recovery communities make the world a better place.
Here are the first lines of David’s Biography on his People page:
‘Professor David Best is Professor of Addiction Recovery, and Director of the Centre for Addiction Recovery Research (CARR), at Leeds Trinity University. He holds various other senior academic posts internationally. He is a founding member of the College of Lived Experience Recovery Organisations (LEROs) in the UK and of the Inclusive Recovery Cities movement.’