Tools to Celebrate Recovery All Year

Recovery Month 2010 may be drawing to a close, but there are great resources for celebrating and promoting recovery from substance abuse all year round.

Want to find a recovery event near you? Check out the “Events by State” tracker on the Recovery Month website. Want to help other people understand recovery language? Share the “recovery jargon” page from the site.

You can find an entire kit on the Recovery Month website to help you host your own event any time of year, along with podcasts, research studies, stories of recovery, and customizable public service announcements for television. You can even take part in a contest on Flickr, the photo-sharing site, by uploading photos of recovery events you took part in.

Even if there were no Recovery Month events happening near you, or you couldn?t attend one, you can participate in the Rally for Recovery! Online, where visitors are currently celebrating over 10,000 years of recovery. There, you can scan photos, videos, Twitter updates, and media stories about events from around the country, or share your own.

Rally for Recovery! Online is sponsored by Faces & Voices of Recovery, which released a DVD on Sept. 16 called, “Our Stories Have Power” (preview it here). The DVD includes two training videos designed to help advocates communicate effectively with the media to promote recovery, and a PowerPoint presentation for training others in the techniques taught in the videos.

Quite an impressive collection of tools, I think. Now that’s how you build a recovery movement.