Inclusive Recovery Cities
What is an Inclusive Recovery City?
An Inclusive Recovery City is a place which promotes visible recovery, challenges stigmatising and discriminatory attitudes and champions multiple pathways to addiction recovery. However, it is also based on the idea that, through doing this, the whole city will grow and benefit.
Based on an idea Professor David Best originally developed with the Belgian academic Charlotte Colman, the aim was to examine what could happen at a municipal level to maximise the likelihood that people could initiate and sustain recovery.
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However, what started as an idea has turned into a social movement with countries across the world engaging with the recovery cities movement.
The Goals of an
Inclusive Recovery CCity
Recovery Events
Organise at minimum of four events each year that are recovery positive and bring together the community
Challenge Stigma and Exclusion
Break down barriers, challenging stimatisation and promoting inclusion
Celebrate Recovery
Celebreate and share the achievements of recovery
Community Engagement and Volunteering
Create pathways for volunteering and community engagement for people in recovery
How does an Inclusive Recovery City Work?
Led by Lived-Experience
People with lived experience of recovery play a central role in leading initiatives, mentoring others, and shaping policies.
Visibility and Awareness
Recovery is celebrated through public events, campaigns, and storytelling, showing that recovery is possible and valuable.
Community and Engagement
People in recovery are supported to participate in volunteering, education, employment, and community events.
Inclusive
Inclusive Recovery Cities work to remove barriers such as discrimination in employment and housing, ensuring fair access to opportunities.
Recovery friendly spaces
Public spaces, workplaces, and local businesses are inclusive and supportive of recovery.
The Social Impact of Inclusive Recovery Cities
Research shows that fostering recovery-friendly communities leads to better public health, reduced crime rates, and stronger community ties. Recovery is a social contagion. As more people experience positive change, they inspire and support others to do the same.
In the UK and across the world over 30 cities and locations have already adopted the IRC model, helping to reshape public perceptions of recovery and create lasting social change.
Strong Communities
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For inclusive recovery cities, the mechanism for generating this community contact and strengthening bonds is celebration events like dry dance nights, festivals and Christmas markets, recovery walks and running clubs. Things that bring people together regardless of their background in a spirit of wellbeing and fun.
This is designed to generate bonding social capital, by bringing people in recovery together to create new social support networks. But it can also link social capital between different and diverse groups to develop new kinds of positive contacts, while challenging myths and prejudices about addiction and recovery.
Great examples from the UK are the Recovery Games held annually in Doncaster, the Sober Social Nights at Recovery Connections in Middlesbrough and the recent Recovery Park Run in Leeds. These events champion wellbeing, bring people together and create the conditions for effective community engagement.
What is unique about the Inclusive Recovery Cities model, and where we are currently focusing our efforts, is demonstrating that recovery events not only serve the recovery community but can be an intrinsic and vibrant part of civic life, dispelling stigma through positive connections and the generation of new assets for the whole community.
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STAR’s role in provides specialist training and support in establishing an Inclusive Recovery City – and our role will grow in evaluating and building Inclusive Recovery Cities once they are formed.
How to become an Incusive Recovery City
Four basic requirements inform the growth of the recovery community and that would pave the way for any city to become an inclusive recovery city:
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Signing the Inclusive Recovery Cities Charter to commit to embracing the principles of inclusion, recovery and reintegration;
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Hosting at least four public-facing recovery events each year, that are inclusive and fun, promoting ways of celebrating recovery while contributing to civic life;
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Creating an Inclusive Recovery Cities board, that involves grassroots recovery and community organisations, specialist addiction treatment services and representatives from the city or municipality; and
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Participating in the Inclusive Recovery Cities movement and exchange of ideas and innovation at a national and international level.
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As with many anti-stigma methods, the primary method of challenging discrimination is through increased levels of contact between the public and people in recovery (regardless of how that is defined or where people are in their own personal journeys).
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