MARCJDUNN LLC
HOLLYWOOD, FLORIDA

Your choices are recovery or relapse. We can help you find a way to change your design for living permanently improves your quality of life. The journey away from relapse and into recovery is available for you. Recovery coaches are people, who may be or may not be in recovery themselves, who help people along the path of recovery—either before, during, after, or instead of treatment. That broad definition is based on interviews with and information from Faces & Voices of Recovery, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), the International Certification and Reciprocity Consortium (IC&RC), NAADAC, the Association for Addiction Professionals (NAADAC), the Medication Assisted Recovery Support (MARS) program, managed care company Optum Behavioral Solutions, and others. Recovery coaches are not therapists. They do not give clinical help; rather, they help the person engage with treatment, and help with various skills needed for recovery. One of the first groups to make recovery coaches a reality, albeit as volunteers at the time, was the Hartford, Conn.-based Connecticut Community for Addiction Recovery. By setting up telephone recovery support more than a decade ago, CCAR showed how a peer staying in touch with patients helped them meet recovery goals. “Peer work is done in the community,” says Patty McCarthy Metcalf, executive director of Faces & Voices of Recovery, the Washington, D.C.-based organization representing recovery community organizations and people in recovery. “The model we’re advocating for is that treatment providers and health insurers will contract with peer recovery organizations” to offer recovery coaches, says Metcalf. Recovery coaches focus on non-clinical issues such as housing, employment, proceeding through drug court, and dealing with probation officers, says Metcalf. Recovery coaches also can help engage people who are waiting to get into treatment. “That’s where we lose so many people,” she says. Colorado’s Faces & Voices affiliate, Advocates for Recovery, has a SAMHSA grant (like many recovery community organizations). So the organization has to record how many people are served. “Right now we are probably serving 200 people,” says Advocates for Recovery executive director Tonya Wheeler, adding that this number includes people served by partners with which her organization (which has only three staff members) collaborates. Advocates for Recovery requires that individuals have a year of uninterrupted recovery before they can be trained as recovery coaches. Tom Coderre, senior advisor at SAMHSA, says the goal of a recovery coach is to help the person sustain recovery. “The entire system of recovery coaches and other peer-type recovery supports has grown organically, because our healthcare system hasn’t always responded to the needs of people with [substance use disorders],” says Coderre, whose roles prior to joining SAMHSA included board chair for Rhode Island Communities for Addiction Recovery Efforts (RICARES). “Our goal is to figure out where those gaps are, and fill them.”