The Recovery Community Center: A New Model for Volunteer Peer Support to Promote Recovery

Abstract

The last decade has seen new forms of peer support emerge from a “new addiction recovery advocacy movement.” One structure for organizing these services is the recovery community center (RCC), which combines the social fellowship of AA with the service mission of a drop-in center, while offering new services like recovery coaching. The backbone of the RCC is its volunteers from the recovery community, who instill hope, role model recovery, and dispel stigma. We describe this model and provide data from two RCCs. These data suggest that RCCs may serve as hubs of recovery-oriented systems of care, serving as the impetus for more rigorous research to be conducted on the role and effectiveness of this emerging form of service delivery.