Recovery Opportunity Center

1) Description of the classroom training program:

 

Making Recovery Real is a flexible curriculum that can be provided in an 8 or 16-hour format to orient attendees to the concepts and tools of recovery from the standpoint of actual hands on practice.  It is an excellent means to introduce recovery on an organizational level by providing students with an overview of recovery practice in contradistinction with existing models of service delivery.  The training also allows an agency to identify specific and incremental steps in a transformational process towards becoming a recovery-based organization.  Experienced recovery-based agencies will find this course very helpful for deepening practice skills in implementing the Five Recovery Pathways, identifying customer strengths, creating collaborative solution-focused recovery plans, and strengthening recovery counseling competences.  Agencies and organizations have chosen to identify employees to be certified as trainers of this curriculum in order to provide recovery-based training to new employees or to provide aspects of the training to customer supporters and community stakeholders.

2) Competencies, content, modules covered in curriculum:

 

The Recovery Innovations Making Recovery Real curriculum is published in a copyrighted 54-page book Making Recovery Real: Going Deeper Workbook, 2011.

 

Content of the Training

 

Module One – Recovery Is Changing Everything: A Sign for the Times

• The Signs of Recovery                                                               
• What Is Recovery                                                                       
• Recovery Is Changing Everything
• Our Story                                                                                    

Module Two– The Five Pathways of Recovery

• Hope                                                                                           
• Choice
• Empowerment
• Recovery Environment

Spirituality: Meaning and Purpose

 

Module Three – Setting the Stage for Recovery

• It’s All in the Package                                                                 
• Weeding Out Non-Recovery Words                                          
• Gaining Fluency in Recovery Language                                    

Module Four – The Power of Peer Support

• The What and Why of Peer Support                                          
• Peer Support Staff Promote the Five Recovery Pathways
• The Diverse Roles of Peer Support Staff                                  

Module Five – Focusing on What’s Strong, Not What’s Wrong

• Having Your Cake and Thinking About It Too                            
• The Power of Attraction                                                              
• Creating Winning Solutions with the Solution Planner                
• How the Solution Planner Works                                                

Module Six – Recovery Conversation

• The Elements of Recovery Coaching                                        
• The Recovery Coaching Step of Clearing                                 
• The Recovery Coaching Step of Connecting                            
• The Value of Getting and Giving Feedback

 

Module Seven – Making a Plan of Action

 

The curriculum begins with an overview of recovery philosophy, history, and current trends.  Participants are introduced to recovery experientially by examining scenarios and their own practice.  The influence of the President’s New Freedom Commission (2005) is touched upon and the transformational story of Recovery Innovations is shared as one example of what the Commission envisioned for all of behavioral health.

 Module 2 shares exercises and explanations designed to make the concepts of the Five Recovery Pathways tangible to a service providers’ daily support of an individual’s recovery journey.  Module 3 builds upon Module 2 be going deeper into creating a recovery environment that supports hope, choice, and empowerment while valuing spirituality. 

Capitalizing on the power of peer support is the subject of Module 4.  We share our experience in moving peer support from the periphery of practice (patient advocacy/assistance & case management) to its defining element (engagement and recovery life style coaching).  We also provide job descriptions and some dos and don’ts in harnessing peer support for consideration in an agency’s implementation of peer support.

Modules 5 and 6 offer a much needed alternative to what many have felt themselves forced to accept: an assessment, treatment planning, and service delivery methodology based on the primacy of diagnosis and symptoms.  We offer our experience in creating a strength-based, solution-focused approach where diagnosis and symptoms are not the main drivers while still meeting the demands of managed care.  In particular we share the tools of the solution planner and the recovery coaching grid as templates for developing assessment, planning, and service delivery processes that create hope, promote choice, and empower customers for recovery.

The course concludes in Module 7 with the opportunity for participants to review the various dimensions of recovery and tools for practice covered in order to create a plan for next steps.  This planning process can be adapted to a given customer’s needs.  Customers may wish the Recovery Opportunity Center to lead an agency through a comprehensive recovery assessment of the organization or planning can be focused on individual or departmental initiatives for transformation.