The Voices Project

Recovery is a social justice issue: many of the problems that created and perpetuate drug-related deaths can be solved by policy change, education, and awareness-raising campaigns. The Voices Project coordinates those efforts to create a constituency of consequence that could be organized to support meaningful, life-saving policy.

As a mobilized, community driven coalition, we can turn the tide of the epidemic and create sustainable change at every level that doesn’t end with a single march or fundraiser. Policy change is crucial to keeping the hard-won gains of trained, organized grassroots advocates who took to the front lines in the fight for equal access to recovery support, treatment, and other services.

Addiction is a crisis of epidemic proportions and shows no sign of slowing down. It affects people of every race, class, social group, religion, and gender. It does not discriminate. Currently, 23 million Americans are in sustained recovery from substance use disorder. Another 22 million are suffering from this highly preventable, treatable illness. One in every three households includes a person with substance use disorder; beyond the home, the prevalence of addiction affects almost everyone. From healthcare systems overloaded with people desperate for help, to criminal justice courts crammed with people who need treatment instead of jail time, our society is burdened by the stigma of addiction.

Without authentic community engagement, organization, and recovery advocacy, millions of people will never access the life-saving support they need. Currently, less than 10 percent of people ever seek medical help of any kind for their addiction. Yet, when the recovery community organizes, reform is possible. Advocates have successfully accessed funding for recovery supports, effective and ethical standards for treatment, and changes to employment processes.

The Voices Project’s scalable model builds capacity using several key strategies. Over time, we will build the necessary leadership, framework, and tools to establish a sustainable coalition in each state in the U.S. Our growth strategies:

● Identification and leadership training for lead organizers in every state
● Identification and training for (at least) one community leader per county in each U.S. state
● In person and digital community engagement trainings in each state with topics determined by community needs assessments to be conducted by state and community leads
● Community and state specific listening sessions for community leaders with local/state stakeholder groups
● State specific toolkit items developed using needs assessments/community listening sessions
● Development of state specific digital community engagement tools and a central hub for list building, contact management with decision makers, calls to action, and network communication in partnership with the stakeholder organizations
● Ongoing technical assistance to state and community leads for coalition building, recruitment, sustainability, fundraising, digital support, and communications
● Development of impact indicators specific to each state and systems for outcomes, measurements, and data collection to demonstrate community impact

As the network grows, the initiative will add staff, offer more scholarships to advocates wishing to attend future Mobilize Recovery training events, utilize translators to improve access and cross language barriers, deepen its research into recovery tools and outcomes, increase the number of trainings and further diversify presenters, improve engagement, and get on an equal footing with groups in the same space.

Our 2018-2020 initial data included people who have worked in the recovery field for decades, as well as relative newcomers. The selection process was a key part of the initiative, and helped identify recovery advocates who were motivated to become community leaders. Hundreds of applicants who were not at Mobilize Recovery's inaugural convening participated via livestream. Returning home, participants were instructed to join a special closed Facebook group and continue attending follow-up sessions via Facebook Live. Participants were given the capability to connect with other advocates in their regions in order to create and coordinate recovery efforts at the local level.

Facebook supported The Voices Project with an inaugural grant through its Community Leadership Program. Leveraging the support from Facebook, The Voices Project raised an additional $130,000 in donations to build staff, support the development of state and local coalitions, and create the framework for sustainable support and trainings. The main programmatic outputs included organizing the initial event, creating educational materials, and sharing the initiative’s goals with participants. Facebook groups and messaging tools enabled this output. For a new group of 185 people in 2019, this was the most efficient way to communicate needs and goals.

We currently have network participants in all 50 states + Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia, conduct bi-monthly leadership calls and trainings, host the annual Mobilize Recovery convening for new leaders, and have built out a leadership and volunteer staff that is able to answer to the needs of our community leaders and members.

The inaugural Voices Project network group included people who have worked in the recovery field for decades, as well as relative newcomers. The selection process was a key part of the initiative, and helped identify recovery advocates who were motivated to become community leaders. Hundreds of applicants who were not at the conference participated via livestream. Returning home, participants were instructed to join a special closed Facebook group and continue attending follow-up sessions via Facebook Live. Participants were given the capability to connect with other advocates in their regions in order to create and coordinate recovery efforts at the local level.

In 2019, The Voices Project selected 150 advocates from a pool of over 1,000 applicants from diverse regions, demographics, recovery pathways, and fields. For the initial roll-out, we focused on Nevada as a model for recovery advocacy and community mobilization. (Subsequent pilot programs have be initiated in the states of Indiana, North Carolina, Tennessee and Rhode Island.) The first Mobilize Recovery/Voices Project convening was held in Las Vegas, Nevada. This event’s outcome was positive and had a significant impact on recovery advocates and front-line responses to the drug epidemic.

While it’s difficult to initially assess the full impact of The Voices Project, the initial response has been powerful. We believe that this impact will only increase over the next years and decades as the participants carry out their advocacy work and share the message of recovery with others. It is fair to assume that each leader reaches 50 people, each of those 50 people reach another 50, and so on. We continue to build and convene a network of advocates who can be mobilized to respond to recovery issues.

We find that there is no “wrong way” to support recovery, though trained, organized advocates will get more from their efforts as they work in tandem with one another in a coordinated strategy. Moving forward, participants will be asked to self-report their progress as “social impact actions” that include all forms of advocacy work, from piloting new community initiatives, to attending town hall meetings, to organizing recovery rallies and events. They will also be asked to record the number of people directly affected by their work, such as the number of students at a recovery high school, the number of people who use a syringe exchange site, and the number of participants in a recovery 5K fundraiser.

The Voices Project’s scalable model will build capacity over its next steps as it continues to host its annual Mobilize Recovery, regional and local events, develops capacity for increased training and recruitment, and measures it's long-term outcomes.