LIVED EXPERIENCE
COMMUNITY CONNECTIONS
F
inding space amongst jostling perspectives and competing priorities is an ongoing challenge for the humble LERO. With daily funding pressures and strains on capacity( more than 3,000 individuals came through our door last year and we’ re a micro-organisation) day-to-day working life is never dull. Yet we need to be operating effectively as a calm antithesis to active addiction, not running around appearing to mirror its stresses and strains. How is this achieved?
In a field seemingly willing to ultra-process basic ingredients, it can be helpful for LEROs that are growing up in a sometimesfrightening world to remember
When LEROs work in real partnership with established local providers, great things can happen says Jon Roberts
core values, beliefs and skillsets. Broadly, these values include maintaining a belief in the wisdom of community – having a faith that often, with the right setting and oversight, people coming together voluntarily in the social setting will unlearn addiction’ s teachings of helplessness.
The emphasis on supportive social processes within positive networks is a belief system also known by another name – mutual aid.
LEROs’ understanding of the importance of setting the social scene comes with good reason. We know most of us learnt to start taking drugs and alcohol in a social environment, so why not start learning to stop in one? Adhering to a focus on the psychologically informed environment – which, in less convoluted talk, means generating recovery from the living room – is a valuable LERO USP.
RETAIL RECOVERY This leads on to acknowledg ing the importance of creating an independent home for recovery in the community, offering open access and high street visibility – retail recovery! Based in a homegrown community rehab, LEROs build a social, principled space where anyone can walk in and immediately sit down to talk with someone with lived experience of services, addiction, harm reduction and recovery. LEROs can offer a warm welcome, independent space and a sense of belonging.
Operating this way in the community – away from burgeoning bureaucracy, the more extreme examples of stifling risk-averse practices and the umbilical cord of bigger providers – the independent LERO remains free to talk truth to its members, and truth to power.
The ABCD approach is a further, articulate example of how LEROs, as freelance frontline providers, can remain nimble, responsive( and entrepreneurial), staying one step ahead by harnessing available assets within local community networks – assets, for some reason, which seem beyond the reach of
Building for the future: preparing for a new roof matches the scale of ambition
18 • DRINK AND DRUGS NEWS • MAY 2025 WWW. DRINKANDDRUGSNEWS. COM