Beckley organizations recognized for recovery effort, invited to global recovery movement
Feb. 27—The Register-Herald
The collaborative efforts among organizations supporting recovery in Beckley have caught the attention of a global initiative seeking to improve awareness and support for people in recovery.
During a Beckley Common Council meeting, Jay Phillips, the executive director of Seed Sower, announced that Beckley is set to become the first Inclusive Recovery City in the United States.
Phillips said the designation, which will require the signing of a charter, will help in further connecting recovery efforts in the area.
"It's about connecting together existing pockets of great work that's already happening in the city and building a network through that (Inclusive Recovery City) charter so that recovery is visible and publicly supported instead of isolated," he said.
The concept of Inclusive Recovery City was brought to light in 2018 by David Best, director of the Centre for Addiction Recovery Research at Leeds Trinity University in the United Kingdom.
Thus far, 26 cities across Europe, the Balkans, South Africa, New Zealand, and Australia have signed charters committing to supporting and carrying out the initiatives specified in the Inclusive Recovery City agreement.
The signing of the charter making Beckley the first Inclusive Recovery City in the United States will take place at 9:30 a.m. Tuesday, March 19, at West Virginia University of Institute of Technology's Neville Auditorium in Beckley.
City, state, national and international leaders are expected to be in attendance for the signing of the charter, including Best, Phillips said.
Philips said Seed Sower caught the attention of Best and other leaders involved with Inclusive Recovery Cities because of its multi-level approach to recovery that involved a network of partnerships.
Seed Sower is a residential recovery service provider with 45 state-certified recovery beds spread across Raleigh, Fayette and Greenbrier counties.
It also offers transportation and peer recovery services and operates a Recovery Community Organization in Beckley, which organizes recovery-focused policy advocacy activities, carries out recovery-focused community education and outreach programs and provides peer recovery support services.
Philips said Seed Sower also partners with other local and state organizations, including Raleigh County Drug Court, Work Force West Virginia, Jobs and Hope WV and others.
Its most visible partnership is with Fruit of Labor, a restaurant in Beckley with a recovery and culinary arts program that employs several of the individuals staying in Seed Sower recovery housing.
Philips said the Inclusive Recovery City model aims to enhance and expand these types of collaborative partnerships.
"We call that a recovery ecosystem when you have multiple community stakeholders engaged to leverage their collective strengths around the recovery efforts," he said.
Phillips said Inclusive Recovery Cities focus on four core ideas: to reduce stigmas surrounding addiction and recovery; to create pathways to community for people in recovery; to contribute to civic society and engagement of vulnerable, marginalized and underserved populations and to foster a concept of reciprocal altruism.
Through these core ideas, Phillips said people in recovery can find support through the community, which they're then able to return down the road.
"When our community friends and neighbors in addiction can see that their community is willing to invest the supports and infrastructure necessary for them to start finding hope and purpose to walk themselves out of addiction, they want to contribute to that community," he said.
Phillips said the goal is also to engage with the community in order to destigmatize substance use disorder.
"We now know conclusively, the evidence behind this is overwhelming, that addiction is not just a series of bad motivations or moral failings, it is an incredibly complex, multi-dimensional problem . . . and we now know that the solution to that is also not simple," he said.
As part of the Inclusive Recovery City model, Phillips said they will form a council made of organizations involved in the recovery effort.
Phillips said the Inclusive Recovery City Council would also seek to catalog all the recovery resources in the area to better support and spread the word about those services and identify the areas lacking.
The council would also be responsible for hosting at least four community recovery events each year.
