Phillip Valentine, Executive Director for the Connecticut Community for Addiction Recovery (CCAR), emphasises that the essential first stages in building a recovery community are to:
- create a vanguard of recovering people who want to tell their story
- organise the community, so that there are many different people, with many different types of recovery, all working towards the same aim.
Phil also stresses the importance of providing a way for people to ‘give back’ – giving back is an essential element of recovery for many people – tapping into this energy and ‘helping it flow to where it wants to go.’
In this interview, Michaela Jones and Phil also discuss the so-called ‘2 year rule’ which stops many recovering people in the UK in getting engaged in a helping role.
