Volunteer

How You can get involved

At New Life II, we ask the community to get in involved through community forums and family education sessions. We host special projects that enhance participation of recovery voices, and we have groups set up for different issues and topics that address our commonalities concerning recovery.

NLll Volunteer peers are strengthened in early recovery by providing support and resources. NLll offers their volunteers orientation and training process as well as various volunteer positions
NLll mandatory volunteer training teaches good communication skills, team building, and they work recovery and faith into the lives of the volunteer
NLll volunteers come from all parts of life and bring with them many pathways to recovery and faith

Our Volunteer Mission

NLll Volunteer Ministry supports peer to peer recovery; organizing not only the recovery community, but the faith-based community as well.

Our Core Values

NLll looks for ways for individuals to use their gifts and assist the community
NLll looks to continue to identify, nurture, and develop leadership from within the recovery and faith-based communities
NLll looks to ensure cultural diversity and bringing together recovery and faith-based communities
NLll listens to our recovery and faith-based members and works hard to implement their suggestions

become an Integrated Healing Facilitator

Examples of roles and responsibilities for an Integrated Healing Facilitator:

Advocacy

In practice, advocacy work encompasses both the work that peers do in fighting for what individuals want and the work that they do to provide individuals with the wherewithal to fight for themselves. They engage in advocacy work when they did things like answer questions or provide information, run a peer support group, work around goal setting and confidence building, and discuss stigma. Helping individuals navigate systems appeared to be a large component of advocacy.

Connecting to resources

Peers work to connect individuals to resources. Examples of this would include connecting individuals to paid and volunteer work opportunities and other activities, to housing, to transportation, to financial resources, and to sources of peer support and other support in the community.

Experiential sharing

Defined in the log instructions as “sharing common experiences; listening to individual’s experiences, and sharing one’s own experiences,” drawing upon their own life experiences in order to share their knowledge is a common element in everything that peers do—from running support groups to speaking with individuals one-on-one to educating staff.

Building community

Peers’ community-building activities encompass two main aims: to establish a sense of community for individuals during their involvement in treatment and to help individuals make meaningful lives in the community. Peers build community when they invite individual participation and run groups in ways that made people feel comfortable and welcome—for example, by providing refreshments. Peers also do things like check-in with individuals who had recently moved to new community housing and made recommendations for community-based programming.

Relationship building

Relationship building includes the work of initiating relationships with individuals, establishing relationships, and of maintaining relationships. Among the specific activities that made up this type of work were the introductions of peers and individuals (usually either initiated by the peer or by another staff member,) conversations between peers and individuals in which peers give advice, act as a sounding board, or simply listen, making (and keeping) appointments with individuals, checking in with individuals who had not been in recent contact, and visiting individuals who had recently transitioned from treatment or incarceration to community or vice versa. Peers also build collective relationships with groups of individuals, generally in group settings.

Integrated Healing Facilitators—people credentialed by life experience and our IHF training—are now being integrated into a wide variety of settings and are delivering services across the stages of long-term addiction recovery. This approach is an integral part of New Life II.

The role of the IHF is to provide care to the recovering participant. Typically, these caregivers have real-life experience in, or with, recovery. Whether they are a volunteer, a family member of a recovering person, or a former addict, IHFs are critically important when providing emotional and informational support to those in recovery at New Life II.

IHFs within an addiction treatment setting are not 12-step counselors. They work to gain the trust of the recovering participant; they are not governed by 12-step rules, although they may use those tools if preferred.

IHFs are often the living proof that addiction recovery works if you put in the energy and time it takes to get sober. The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) cites the scientific literature that suggests IHFs offer four types of social support in addiction treatment settings:

Informational, by providing referrals to social service programs
Emotional and compassionate support
Instrumental, including assisting with tasks
Affiliation’s help in setting up community networks

The personal experiences of IHFs can be very helpful to a participant seeking a role model. Sometimes just being with someone who has been through the painful recovery process and comes out the other side is an affirmation that they need to move forward. These are the sometimes intangible but always crucial mechanisms that aid in the recovery process.

Leveraging healing facilitators in addiction treatment is an important, but sometimes unrecognized part of the recovery process. An IHF can provide particpants with a warm, human, reality-based voice that offers practical guidance in developing community support systems. While these are non-clinical caregivers, they play an important role in addiction treatment and recovery care modalities.

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