I just wanted to let you know that this will be the last post on Recovery Voices for 2023. Wulf and I wanted to take this opportunity of wishing all our readers a Merry Christmas. We hope that you and yours have an enjoyable and restful holiday period. We’d also like to wish you the very best for 2024.
We launched the Recovery Voices website three months ago to the day, after a six-month preparatory phase involving 11 interviews conducted online, as well as a good deal of film editing and writing. It was the day the Annual UK Recovery Walk took place, 23 September. I recently remembered that Linda filmed me as I made the website ‘live’, so I decided to include the film in this post. I think you can sense my excitement… and relief when awe went’ live’.
To date, Wulf Livingston and I have interviewed eight people—including my interviews of Wulf—for the Recovery Voices project, six of whom appear with links to film clips of their interviews on our People page. Some were interviewed on more than one occasion. These six are James Deakin (North Wales Recovery Communities), Wendy Dossett(Emeritus Professor at University of Chester), Huseyin Djemil (Towards Recovery), Marcus Fair (Eternal Media), Wulf Livingston (Professor of Alcohol Studies, Wrexham University), and Dr. David McCartney (Lothians and Edinburgh Abstinence Programme).
I am currently editing films for the two latest people that Wulf has recently interviewed. Tim Leighton worked for Clouds and Action on Addiction for 36 years. He inspired me greatly during many conversations, in the three years that I was External Examiner for the University of Bath Foundation Degree and B.Sc. in Addictions Counselling. Tim designed, co-developed and ran that course, which was launched in 2004.
Rhoda Emlyn-Jones of Cardiff County Council was instrumental in the development of Option 2, a substance misuse programme for families with children at risk of being taken into care. My colleague Becky Hancock and I evaluated that programme in the early when we conducted the Welsh Drug and Alcohol Treatment Fund evaluation during 2000-2002. Rhoda’s programme is very impressive.
I’d like to thank again the seven people who Wulf and I have interviewed for participating in our project, and Wulf for being such a great collaborator. I’m thrilled that we set this project up together.
