Community listening session highlights efforts to address addiction
The audience was the focal point of a community listening session as people in recovery, allies and certified recovery specialists discussed local efforts to address addiction with facilitators at Grace Community Wellness Center on Tuesday, Aug. 1.
Community members and experts exchanged ideas with representatives from the Armstrong-Indiana-Clarion Drug and Alcohol Commission (AICDAC), which hosted the event at 123 E. Diamond St. early Tuesday evening. The presentation, which began at 5 p.m., quickly evolved into a dialogue, with community members sharing ideas, challenges and hopes relating to recovery in Butler County that AICDAC facilitators jotted down on large posters.
The meeting marked the initial round of countywide listening sessions and will be used to gather data and spark preliminary discussion around substance use disorder, community support and pathways to recovery. Smaller focus groups will meet sometime in September or October, facilitators said.
According to the Pennsylvania Department of Drug and Alcohol Programs, a division of the Department of Health, AICDAC was one of six organizations across the region to be awarded a grant of up to $500,000 as part of Pennsylvania’s Recovery Rising initiative, which will fund nine regional recovery hubs across the state.
Mike Krafick, who facilitated the conversation with consultant Owen Dougherty, is the director of the program’s sixth region, which includes Butler, Beaver, Armstrong, Indiana, Cambria, Washington, Westmoreland, Greene, Fayette and Somerset counties. AICDAC serves 22 counties overall, he said.
“There’s a lot of variety if you think about those counties,” Dougherty said. “There’s a lot of variety in needs, in strengths and likely in gaps in how recovery is being supported.”
He asked audience members for their input.
“So, if you’re a person in recovery, what’s helped you get well? What has helped your friends get well? What’s working on the ground to help find (the way to) recovery but also sustain recovery?” Dougherty said.
Audience members touched on the importance of education, harm reduction, peer support, responsible media coverage, faith and community in helping people recover. Community outside of treatment is missing for many, and a 12-step program is not the path for everyone, said AICDAC certified recovery specialist Shasta Wilkinson. “Recovering out loud,” or sharing one’s story, is beneficial to people in recovery and to communities where stigma can lead to discrimination and alienation, facilitators said.
"What I heard you talking about is really self-stigma,“ Dougherty said in reply to a man describing his journey to recovery. “That we stigmatize ourselves. And then one of the things that can help that is us talking about our recovery, or being more public about our recovery.“
County Commissioner Kevin Boozel, who serves on the Commissioners’ Council on Drug and Alcohol, touched on compassion fatigue and burnout, and said compassion is needed on both sides from those struggling with substance use disorder and those — particularly paramedics and local authorities — struggling to treat a chronic disease.
After the meeting, Boozel expressed that substance use disorder has become normalized in Butler County. Paramedics struggle with burnout, responding to the same type of cases, but are rarely in positions where they encounter people in recovery, he noted after the meeting.
