Addiction Recovery and Resilience: Faith-based Health Services in an African American Community

Analyzes the tensions and triumphs of a unique, faith-based, addiction recovery organization in a high poverty neighborhood.

We live in an era of substance misuse colliding with public health shortcomings. Consequences of mass incarceration and other racial disparities of the "drug war" are felt acutely in the neighborhoods and communities least equipped to deal with them. More than 600,000 people are released from US prisons each year; nearly two-thirds of returning citizens have a substance use disorder (SUD) and have limited access to treatment. Even among the general public, only one in ten people with SUD receive any type of specialty treatment. Community organizations make important contributions to improve access and help to heal these societal fractures. Using a social ecology of resilience model, Addiction Recovery and Resilience is a yearslong ethnographic case study of a faith-based health organization with a focus on long-term recovery. It explores the organization's triumphs and missteps as it has worked to respond to the opioid crisis and improve the health of affiliates and the neighborhood for nearly twenty years. Addiction Recovery and Resilience concludes with best practices for individual, organizational, and community health and public policy at a time when nontraditional health care providers are increasingly important.