Faces & Voices of Recovery, Recover Alaska, and Change 4 The Kenai are hosting a community forum to discuss ways to support alcohol and drug addiction recovery in Kenai and Soldotna.
Creating Recovery-Ready Communities is an event that will take place on Tuesday, February 18 at the Quality Inn in Kenai. The goal is to explore the elements of a recovery-ready community. Prevention, substance-free recreation, employment, education, recovery housing, and peer-based recovery support services are just some of what will be covered.
Patty McCarthy, CEO of Faces & Voices of Recovery, discusses how her organization came to find the need to educate communities: “There needed to be more in the community than treatment and prevention services. They were working on building an infrastructure of recovery support services. So, those individuals came together for a summit and came out of that with the need for a campaign. So, Faces & Voices really began as a campaign – a messaging campaign – to put a face and a voice on recovery, to show the public that recovery works and that there were millions of people in recovery across the nation and around the world.”
She also mentions that stigmas about addicts have hurt efforts for them to get treatment, but that it’s a fading trend: “This is a chronic, treatable, medical condition but gets very little support in the communities because it’s not the same as having a loved-one diagnosed with cancer. People aren’t bringing pot-luck meals for the family whose child is in drug treatment . They’re not sending get-well cards for someone who just went away for 30 days for treatment. When they return, they’re not providing a conductive recovery environment, the way that they will with other medical illnesses. There’s a lot of work to be done, but by bringing awareness, I think people have more compassion, they understand that this is a medical condition. So, we’re meeting more and more to tell these stories of people overcoming addiction.”
The Quality Inn in Kenai is between Safeway and Walmart on the Kenai Spur Highway. Everyone who attends will walk away with a list of ways to support recovery in Kenai and Soldotna.