(P5): Local Community Use of the Recovery Model for CAS Change

A diagram of a Community-Based Recovery Model. The core of the diagram is a red oval labeled Individuals and Families; The Connected  Yellow Ovals include Home: Permanent Housing; Health: Recovery, Health, and Wellness;  Purpose: Employment and Education; and Community: Social Inclusion.

Although Recovery is a model first developed for people with lived experience of mental illness, and although the word Recovery seems to point to the idea of cure as a solution to disability, as the model has developed, it is an excellent framework for small mutual support social groups to use person-centered planning to forge individual paths to personal autonomy and freedom of choice.

Recovery allows a person with the support of others who understand their lived experience of disability to manage those parts of life that interfere with that individual path. It doesn’t matter whether the interference is from a so-called “symptom” or a so-called “social determinant”. The process of finding a way to reduce or eliminate the constraint is the same.

The resources in the slide are only the tip of the iceberg in making use of the Recovery Model. The Guiding Principles of Recovery also clearly show the connection to the driving and organizing power of Person-Centered Planning:

Recovery:

  • emerges from hope
  • is person-driven
  • occurs via many pathways
  • is holistic
  • is supported by peers and allies
  • is supported through relationship and social networks
  • is culturally based and influenced
  • is supported by addressing trauma
  • involves individual, family, and community strengths and responsibility
  • is based on respect

This model is also useful for thinking about how to organize locally to produce a change in the CAS that enable or destabilize our personal and group advocacy efforts. The Recovery model should be a core of organizing locally regardless of the kind of lived experience that triggers an embrace of this model. It is also a key to building organized change through the collaboration of different disability communities (including the Substance Use Disorder community). With a common person-centered model of how we achieve together, we can be more effective advocates.

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License

Author: disabilitynorm

hubby2jill, advocate50+yrs, change strategist, trainer, geezer, Tom and Pepper the wundermutts

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