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STAY SAFE
STAY SANE
STAY SERENE
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...on the matter of recovery
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"You don't pay love back. You pay it forward."
Lily Hardy Hammond
Recovery
from addiction is a “turning of the soul—from an obsessive self-absorption in one’s drug to a foliation of loving care for others.
Here are just some of the faces and some of the stories of
our alumni in their
recovery
....."
paying it forward!"
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Thank you, so much!
We look forward to hearing about how things come along.
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OUR NEW ALUMNI
COORDINATOR TEAM!
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Gabby T. &
Jeff B.
have stepped up as a team to serve in the role of Alumni Coordinators.
The idea is to facilitate a cummunity of support, friendship, and collegiality among our alumni. One device already in place is an alumni facebook group set up by Tommy D., who served as Coordinator before Jeff and Gabby came on board.
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TOMMY: OUR ALUMNI BOARD MEMBER
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Tommy has been an alumni member of the Board of Directors for several months. Already he has distinguished himself by way of his insightful contributions to our deliberations.
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OUR ALUMNI MEMBERS OF THE CANDIDATE SELECTION BOARD
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Justin E,
Mark C,
Dan M,
Mikey T,
Matthew V,
Tommy D
THANK YOU, ALL!
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AND
OUR GRATITUDE GOES OUT TO:
Justin E., for his work as a tech at Spearhead Lodge;
Mikey T., for his work as a tech at Spearhead Lodge;
Rhiannon A., for her work as a tech at The Arbors.
AND TO:
Dan M., for his continuing work as a tech at Infinite;
Gabby T., for her work as a tech at The Arbors;
Tommy D., for being promoted to 12 step coordinator at Spearhead Lodge after working there as a tech; and to,
Mikey T., who has accepted the role of social media manager for R2RCNY.
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"The irony about sobriety is that it isn’t about sobriety. It’s about empowering a person to re-engage in meaningful life."
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- Volunteer Coordinator, Colleen Buxton, and volunteer, Barbara Brace, joined Darlene recently in the project of entirely reorganizing the volunteer wing of our organization. Please see “Volunteer News” (below) for details.
- We wish to thank the Mooney Marketing Group, especially its founder and CEO, Patrick Mooney, for all work done on our behalf during the past few months. As you may have seen, their video/ad-spot for R2RCNY is presently appearing on local TV. We are so very pleased with the production ,quality of this piece and with the impact that it has already had on our community. In addition, their revamp of our web page is now complete. You are encouraged to click-in and take a look, if you have not already. We think you’ll be pleased! Again, thank you,, Mooney Marketing Group!! To see the video developed by the Mooney Group click HERE. To see the revised web page, click HERE.
- The Donor Development Taskforce has continued its important work of developing a sustainable cycle of donations gleaned from an ever-increasing list of committed donors. A follow-up “Thank You” letter was sent in March to everyone on our lists and a formal Appeal letter was sent in early June. The donations received on the basis of the Appeal letter suggest that we have much work to do. The committee met on June 25th to discuss how to proceed.
- DEWITT COMMUNITY CHURCH: MISSION OF THE MONTH We are pleased to report that of 12 charity applicants, only three were selected, and R2RCNY was one of the three. This means that the Mission commits to supporting us for three years. We will get a check once/year from a collection of the congregation during church and another once/year as a percentage of the budget. In the past, this amounted to several thousand dollars a year. With changes due to COVID, it may be less, but we will see. However things work out, this is wonderful news!
- R2RCNY has now received the extraordinary donation of $29.4k from Romano Subaru "Share the Love." We have extended to them our every "thank you" and would encourage folks to stop in to Romano Subaru and "share the love" back.
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NOTA BENE:
From now on our volunteers will be called '
advocates
.' The change in terminology does not reflect a change in purpose, or tasks, or how it is that one becomes such. Rather, it reflects the fact that our
volunteers
are essentially
advocates
of the cause--of the mission--of Road2RecoveryCNY. So, going forward, when you see/read '
advocates,
' do understand that we are speaking of our able crew of
volunteers.
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NEXT
ADVOCATE MEETING!
JULY 9TH
6:30-8:00p.m.
The Endys
4965 South Eagle Village Rd., Manlius, NY
Attendees are asked to bring lawn chairs for outdoor, social-distanced meeting.
Liquid refreshment will be provided
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CONGRATULATIONS
(and thank you so much!)
Anne Glenny
has been recognized for her distinctive contribution to the mission of R2RCNY by being awarded the
Kevin Donovan
Outstanding Volunteer of the Quarter Award
**
Anne serves on the Candidate Selection Board, as a Navigator, and also co-chairs our Family Recovery Program. She is thoughtful, compassionate, and committed to helping people affected by addiction.
Bravo, Anne!
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**
The Kevin Donovan Outstanding Volunteer award is presented quarterly in honor of our friend, consultant, and, volunteer, Kevin, whose selfless commitment to reducing stigma and helping people struggling with addiction was admired by everyone who knew him. Our award is presented quarterly to a Road2RecoveryCNY volunteer who demonstrates a similar spirit. Kevin worked in harm reduction and trained thousands of CNY residents how to use Narcan: a drug that reverses opioid overdoses. He used his own recovery story to educate his audiences, encouraging them to see people with addiction with new eyes.
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- Our organization of advocates has been structured with a list of work groups with a short job description for each. Each advocate has received a phone conversation in order to identify which of these groups s/he wishes to join. From there, under the leadership of an Advocate Chairperson, the work groups have begun to meet separately. These smaller Advocate meetings provide an opportunity for each group to work on their particular objectives, have fellowship, and be prepared to report when the advocates meet as a large group. In this way it is hoped that each advocate will enjoy a more meaningful connection with h/his work and with h/his co-workers--this, while each group project is advanced by the focus of such a division of labor. To date both the Donor Development Taskforce and the Fundraising Committee have met in Zoom format.
- Below is our working list of work groups in the new organizational system for our Advocates:
- Donor Development Task Force
- Fighting Stigma Group
- Fundraising Events Group
- Gratitude Event Group
- Alumni Support
- Social Media/PR
- Family Recovery Program
- Navigators
- Candidate Selection Board
- Board of Directors
- Oswego County Advocates
For a more thorough presentation of these groups--their work assignments, membership, and leadership--please click
HERE
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Remember our new segment to this newsletter-- "MY TURN." It provides a space wherein we will publish notes and comments submitted by our readership. Each of you is invited to submit your thoughts on matters germaine to our organization and work. In particular, we would love to hear back from you with your thoughts about what has been presented within the newsletter itself. We shall do our best to publish these--with, of course, a tad of editorial discretion. To submit your comment simply email it to
r
ob.flower67@gmail.com
.
Let's get the conversation going!
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THANK YOU, BARRY!
Barry Weiss, Chairperson of the Board of Directors, has stepped down from the Chair and submitted his resignation from the Board (effective, June 1
st
, 2020). We wish to thank Barry for his extensive contributions to the work of R2RCNY and for his distinctive leadership as our organization moved from its fledgling beginnings to its present status as a viable and widely recognized non-profit. We wish Barry and Kathy well as they begin to turn their lives toward life in retirement. And, as with each of our Board resignees, we hope that his departure from the Board does not signal a departure from the R2RCNY community!
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- The Board has reconstituted its Nominating Committee in its continuing effort to maintain a fully viable membership.
- A sub-committee on Strategic Planning has continued to report to the Board during its spring meetings. Progress has been made in the effort to reformulate the primary objectives of R2RCNY moving forward into the next five years. A more extensive report on these matters will be forthcoming upon the completion of this work.
- The Board has decided that it needs to confront the matter of the Sober Living Home head-on. It has agreed to discuss the advisability/viability of this project at its July meeting.
- The Board continues to review and monitor the work of R2RCNY as it receives and discusses monthly reports from both our CEO (Darlene) and our acting Financial Officer (Judy Frank). We continue to enjoy, with all due gratitude, the highest confidence in Darlene’s leadership. As well, we would like to thank Judy for her continued efforts to keep track of “things financial” in our organization. It is a pleasure to report here that we continue along an upward curve of fiscal health throughout what remains a challenging year. We have every reason to be enthusiastic about our fiscal profile going forward.
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THE SHAPE OF RECOVERY
Recovery
is everywhere in the news these days—and with it questions as to what this notion really means as one crosses from one context to another. There are the many questions that hang over recovery from Covid-19—from those attendant upon individuals trying to overcome the virus to those attendant upon the recovery of whole nations. And there are the energized discussions of the shape of economic recovery—again, both personal and national (global). Will it be a “V” or more like a “U” or kind of unshaped squishy-thing that never does return to where things left off?
We of Road2RecoveryCNY are prone to speak of ourselves as being in “the recovery business” and, more often than not, take ourselves, in spirit or otherwise, to be members of the “recovery community.” Perhaps now might be a propitious moment to look into the shape of our own notion of recovery. What, exactly, does
‘recovery’
mean in the world of opioid addiction?
However steep might be the curve into addiction the acclivity of recovery is never sharply upward and rarely without the zig of some unforeseen infelicity, or the zag of some downturn.
This is because addiction is a disease that involves a unique intimacy (some might say “complicity”) with choices made by the victim him/herself—both as this person descends into and then attempts to lift out of the condition of addiction. Addiction is a neural-physiological hijacking of a person’s power of self-determination. Addiction is a hijacking of the will.
Recovery demands that one goes through a series of exercises by which the will can be extricated from the hold that one’s addictive substance has over one’s brain chemistry. This involves a complex set of negotiations on the part of the victim by which she/he is empowered (re-empowered) to choose against the physiological calling of the drug—this until the brain is allowed the time to re-establish more natural courses of neural transmission. During the time when his/her body’s attempts to deal, physiologically, with the absence of the drug’s flooding of h/her neural transmitters, massive tensions develop between the psychology and the physiology of this condition. What this means is that during this process, at any time, the will to resist can fail and the victim will fall victim, again, to the pull toward the drug. Recovery often involves the building of temporary (for the most part) bridges of neural transmission. This is the physiological counterpart to the effort on the part of the recovering addict to embrace a “higher power.” Shifting over to such more “natural” modes of neural bridging empowers the recovering addict to sustain hise/herself during this process of extrication.
It is a serious misperception of opioid recovery to imagine a person exiting from any treatment program “recovered”: no matter how good the program, how long its duration, or how many stages of social re-entry it lays down. The best programs provide the victim with personal and interpersonal devices or mechanisms of behavior modification (i.e., rehabituation). The hope is that these will become the tools by which he/she maintains sobriety during the hardest periods of extrication and which will, in turn, sustain the victim as he/she attempts to weave h/her life into the normal and healthy courses of social living.
Recovery means reclaiming one’s life. Addiction is the shrinking of life into an incredibly narrow (and dangerous) course of responding to a physiological aberration in brain chemistry. In its wake trails all else in human life—most especially, the rich fabric of meaning through which an individual sustains a robust life within society. Recovery is the reclaiming of these courses of meaning. It involves a re-establishing of these courses—this, or the reconstituting of altogether new ones. When human life is healthy, neural transmissions run the courses of meaning—those whereby a person gleans a sense of self-identity and self-worth in a drug-free context. Recovery is the rediscovery of the intimacy in human life between pleasure and meaning! It is a rediscovery that takes place by practice: exercises that aspire to become habits in the ways of living.
This duality of extrication and reclaiming is a huge order. The individual who has achieved mature recovery can look back and recognize having negotiated an incredibly challenging mine-field of relapse. Though this mine-field becomes less and less pervasive in its present danger—as the mines seem to become more and more distanced from each other—even by years in one’s journey of recovery—it is a mine-field from which the recovering addict is never free. Indeed, the mature person-in-recovery recognizes that the life of
recovery
is a
life
of recovery.
As someone who presently enjoys some twenty-odd years of recovery (from alcohol) I can say that there is a life of recovery wherein the claim of one’s substance feels like a memory—where the living day-to-day has literally lost even the slightest sense of apprehension of any future life-theft by one’s drug. It does not mean that one is completely free from those occasional “hits” wherein a context triggers up that “ghost from the past.” However, I can assure you, the spectre of such ghosts are lightyears from the palpable presence of the vibrant claim of one’s drug. Recovery means using each such moment as a lesson—a reminder—of the horrors wrought by the reality of addiction—and a source of enlivened resolve to never fall victim again.
We of Road2RecoveryCNY must continue the fight, not just of bringing victims of opioid addiction into recovery, but the fight of educating our communities as to the meaning of recovery itself. Talk of percentages and recovery rates, efforts to explain away the data of relapse: these are ways that we perpetuate misunderstanding and, yes, stigma. The shape of recovery from opioid addiction can be squishy, indeed. What is critical is the hue: that--albeit slowly-- it moves ineluctably from the darkness into the light.
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Donate Your Bottles & Cans
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Be sure to remember to drop off your bags of deposit bottles/cans (with Road2RecoveryCNY written on the side) at:
F-M Returnables at 202 West Seneca Street in Manlius.
315-682-4830
or
Central City Bottle Redemption, 224 Chapel Drive, Syracuse (Fairmount), NY 13219
Every dollar helps us send people to lifesaving treatment!
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