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Are you someone who cares about people? Do you seek information to support people you care about who have families? Do you care about people affected by addiction, substance use disorders, or work in the field of family support or peer recovery support? Spend about twenty minutes each month with the President and CEO of Archways Recovery Community Organization and Family Resource Centers who shares hope, strength and stories from the field and practice of Peer Recovery Support Services and Family Support & Strengthening.
Narrator 00:02
Welcome to Archways Threads, a show focusing on the threads of family and recovery support services that help make up the tapestry of life in recovery. Join us as we share stories from peers and participants in the field and practice of peer recovery support, and family support and strengthening. And now your host, Archways CEO Michelle Lennon.
Michelle Lennon 00:28
Hi. I'm Michelle Lennon, and I'm welcoming you to the second installment of our conversations with Karen Welford on the subject of family support and strengthening. If you missed the first episode, I encourage you to go back and listen to it as the precursor to today. Thank you.
Michelle Lennon 00:46
One of the things that programs and Family Resource Centers do, too, is affirm and strengthen families' cultural, racial, and linguistic identities, and enhance their ability to function in a multicultural society. And I was thinking about how often I hear about how New Hampshire is predominantly Caucasian, with about a 5% population that would identify otherwise. But when I look at the kids, I am seeing a lot of multiracial kids, and I have a feeling within this next generation that's completely going to change. And so I was thinking about how important it is for family support workers, even if you think that we're more homogeneous than what we hear in trainees, we need to be trained in this stuff.
Karen Welford 01:34
Absolutely.
Michelle Lennon 01:34
Yeah. What are your thoughts about that?
Karen Welford 01:37
Yeah, and there's lots of levels. I mean, it's one of the things that in training, for the standards of quality we talk about a lot, is there's lots of levels of diversity, and it isn't just about racial identity. It's about a lot of other things and just hoping one of the responsibilities, again, of family support, is that you help families understand how to work within this diversity. And I think it can be a little tricky, especially nowadays, but however we can do that, and by bringing people together and having people build a relationship with each other is the start. You know that you have a way of bringing people together and having them work together on something is the start of them understanding the differences and the similarities that we all have.
Michelle Lennon 02:41
I was in a training and the woman talked about the different types of pie that exist in the world, and how everybody likes pie but the fillings are always different. It is an oversimplified picture, but just thinking about how we go out of the way to make sure we have access to the language bank and things like that. That diversity, like you said, is more than that, though. It's cultural identity, it's growing up in a French Catholic family, or growing up in a family with no parents at home. We used to talk about latchkey kids back in the day as if it was some terrible thing. And now most parents work because the times change. So I think the cultural shifts change, and keeping up with that can be hard, but again, for most people the labels don't matter all that much. They just want to play with their kid and they just want to be another parent in the room. When we integrated our playgroup for individuals and parents that are in recovery with just all parents, nobody knows who's what. They're not caring about labels. It's like, "Hey, did you watch this last night on Netflix?" or whatever. And they just get to be. I love that about Family Resource Centers, that inclusivity so that the labels sometimes fade away, unless people want to celebrate something about their identity, and then they have the opportunity to do that, too. It's always been a good thing.
Karen Welford 04:16
And again that's practice at removing our judgments. It may not be how we were brought up, and it's one of my favorite sayings: "It's not good or bad, it's just different." And we have to keep saying that to ourselves and to staff, because they will come across so many. It's the richness of what we do, actually.
Michelle Lennon 04:43
Yeah, the spice of life, right? Programs of Family Resource Centers are generally embedded in their communities and contribute to the community building process. You've talked a little bit about that, and I think about community collaborations. I think of Erin Pettingill and her work for community collaborations out of the Family Resource Center in Laconia, and how amazing that was to build these coalitions, to come together and work together and push things forward. And I know we've collaborated even with them a few times where we specialized in recovery support services as a Family Resource Center and how they provided a venue, they provided childcare, and they provided dinner, and we provided a facilitator of parenting journey and recovery. And watching those community collaborations grow, and just thinking about how we are contributing in a meaningful way to that community building process, when we talk about these principles of family support. That it's not about just us, that it's really about making the world a better place for families. And you've had a lifetime of pouring into that work.
Karen Welford 05:55
I think it began with working with the group of disabilities. At one time, any program that was for a child with disabilities or an adult with disabilities was that program on the hill that nobody wanted to have anything to do with, except for if you had to go there. So that was really where we started, maybe also with that program for recovery. It took conscious work to move into the community, to say: "No, we're not just that program. We're part of the community. We're all part of the community. So there."
Michelle Lennon 06:51
The differences, right? It goes back to that and judgment and the recovery community. Having been a family affected by substance use disorders, I think about the shame, the stigma, protect your reputation, going to service providers and not being treated well at all sometimes, and how Family Resource Centers are that place where, generally, you can go and not worry about any of that judgment, regardless of who you are or what you're going through. Sometimes we refer to higher levels of care for mental health conditions and things like that, or to other service providers. We don't do early supports and services at our Family Resource Center; we would refer to the different agencies that do in our area. But it's like the "No Wrong Door" thing--a Family Resource Center is the "No Wrong Door"--is what I have found throughout the state, as far as those that come together.
Karen Welford 07:45
It really is. What I really found, and why I really was drawn to Family Resource Centers in thinking of what this was in the community, it's one of the very, very few programs that is non-categorical, that you don't have to be "this" to be eligible.
Michelle Lennon 08:04
Yes.
Karen Welford 08:05
It's welcoming to anyone in the community, and it's hard to think of another program. In fact, I was just talking to someone on your staff, and they were saying--with a family that really had so many, so many, so many challenges--and they were saying, "Well, we don't know whether we're the place that can take care of this." And I said, "Where else is there?" I mean, it was really...there were so many challenges that, yes, we referred for specific things, but for that family to feel like we're walking with them through whatever is happening, it is the Family Resource Center, and sometimes in the staff, it's like, "I don't know if we can do it," but somehow we do it.
Michelle Lennon 08:53
I think about the family support specialist, and I would say the peer support workers are this way, too. They just do what needs to be done sometimes. A funny story: One of our family support workers was observed by somebody and a gentleman walked in very frazzled, probably in his late 80s, trying to find the water department because they've blocked off the roads because there's been some sinkholes that have appeared, and he was very frazzled. And she's like, "Oh, I will walk you right there to the door. No worries at all."
Karen Welford 09:28
Amazing.
Michelle Lennon 09:28
And that's just the kind of...I always say she's a family support worker.
Michelle Lennon 09:38
So, programs also do a lot of advocacy and advocate with families for services and systems that are fair and responsive and accountable to the families that they serve. Boy, I think probably that value was so drilled into me as a person working for you, I would say. That probably resulted in where our choice is today. Because, of course, it was in the Tilton area where everything started, and there was just no resources for people is how it felt to me, for people coming through our church food pantry at the time. And it's like, "What do we do?" It had been the mantra of: "Well, what does a family support specialist do?" If you can't find a resource, you'd be the resource, and it kind of snowballed from there.
Karen Welford 10:18
Whatever needs to happen.
Karen Welford 10:26
Yeah, and that's what we were saying, too. How many of the services that they're involved are fair and responsive? If you think of medical services, if you think of educational services, if you think of welfare services: Are they fair and responsive and accountable to the families they serve? We hope so, but that it's one of the things that we can help advocate for.
Michelle Lennon 10:52
Yeah, yeah. Not from my agency, but somebody else who wasvery adept in this field, and now works doing other work, was dealing with a situation, and just knew to call 603 Legal Aid. How many people don't know that when landlords try to trample on your rights, that there are things to protect you? And having been a landlord in the past, I knew all the rules and I lived by them, so I never had any issues. But I think about how greed exists in this world and right now we have such a housing crisis that we're seeing people get evicted for stuff just because the landlord wants to renovate and rent out at massive increases. So, we're seeing so much in the housing area. And thankfully, family support specialists have that advocacy training to be able to just know what's right is right and to help families navigate that. And I do think that we have gotten used to some systems not treating people fairly, but also find that when we build those collaborative relationships, like with town welfare, things go well. And I just witnessed one of our town welfares do some really hard work moving some mountains to get somebody housed, and I think family support specialists can also build those relationships that can help smooth the path for families, when I think about that advocacy. You talked a little bit about this, too, that practitioners of family support mobilize formal and informal resources to support family development. And I think that is another big departure from clinical services that sometimes people who don't understand family support as a practice call us out on having loose ethics, that our ethical boundaries need looked at. Boundaries, boundaries, boundaries, right? And for me, I'll just say, and people who work with me know this, I don't care if I have a master's degree, a doctorate, I am not getting licensed in clinical work because I can't abide by the boundaries. Because I am somebody that is always going to buy lunch for somebody that is hungry. And again, I say, not wrong, not right. Different. Our ethical boundaries are different in the practice of family support or peer recovery support work. Peer support has all of these rules that they have to live with, and the administrative rules and all that, family support is looser.
Karen Welford 13:30
It sure is, and that's hard on the organization sometimes, because there's a fine line often that needs to be walked as far as boundaries and ethics and practice, and we have to continually talk about that within the lens of family support. There's nothing, there's very little that guides us, I can say.
Michelle Lennon 14:04
Agency policy probably is what a family support worker...
Karen Welford 14:08
Right, but then there needs to be that policy. So that's a tough one, I have to say.
Michelle Lennon 14:15
I know for peer support workers, you can't enter into a business relationship with somebody you're coaching. You can't give money to somebody that you're coaching. And I always tell my staff when you run into something that you have a question, there's the ethical decision-making process that we go through. We use it for family support, too. Who is it going to benefit? Who's it going to harm? The field, the practice, the agency, you as a support worker, the participant. Because sometimes we can overgive and it steals people's dignity.
Karen Welford 14:45
That's right.
Michelle Lennon 14:46
And we don't want to do that. We want to help build that self-efficacy and let people keep their pride.
Karen Welford 14:55
Yes, and one of the things--when we did training for the standards--we talked about is the word "empowerment" and the national network actually suggests we stop using that, because who are we to give power to someone? And that's what "empowerment" means, and so you share power. You don't empower people, if that's what you're talking about. Again, we've talked about empowerment forever; we thought we were doing right. So things evolve as far as our thinking of what is best for families and individuals.
Michelle Lennon 15:47
I always had the idea that empowering somebody is like you don't have the power for yourself. We talk about this with hope, too, and peer recovery support as a core value, because hope is something that everybody needs to have a little bit of. And there are some times people feel hopeless. And so I've gotten away from saying, "I'm going to give you hope." And it's like, "Let me carry yours until you can take it back." And try to normalize that it's okay to feel lousy some days. But we're not going to let you sit in it forever.
Karen Welford 16:26
And to let them know somebody has hope for you. That's really powerful for those...just somebody is hopeful, and so it doesn't feel quite as hopeless.
Michelle Lennon 16:38
Yeah, for the future. And I think mobilizing those formal and informal supports. We can do those warm handoffs to resources, and we can have conversations. We can make three-way calls, or calls on a speaker phone or all that. But those informal networks are really important, too. So, programs are flexible and continually responsive to emerging family and community issues. I love that idea, because I think too often programs hang around longer than they should because they're really not having the impact that we hope. And I think the key is always being adaptable and really participant-driven, meaning that according to what the people coming through the door need is what we're responding to. But that's not always the case.
Karen Welford 17:29
No, but I think what this brings to mind is what you mentioned before was when COVID hit, New Hampshire Family Resource Centers went virtual, even though it was really hard. But they knew that's what their families needed. That, to me, was one of the biggest examples of being flexible and changing with the needs of the family.
Michelle Lennon 17:56
Yeah, and we learned a lot of lessons during that time.
Karen Welford 18:00
Absolutely, and so still now I can think of some of those programs that are providing virtual services. I mean, there's some good that came out of thatchange that happened, but programs could have said, "Okay, we're closing our doors for the next six months because we can't come together. We can't come to your home. So that's it." But they weren't. None of the--not that I know of--any of the Family Resource Centers did that, and I really commend them for it. It says a lot about commitment within the system.
Michelle Lennon 18:35
Yeah, I think the organizations, the home visitors, their hearts go into their families, and we were fortunate in New Hampshire. I know New Hampshire Charitable Foundation gave us the funding to be able to pivot really quickly to having online services. So all of our home visitors and peer support specialists had iPhones, so everything was encrypted, and they could do FaceTime with an individual participant. We ended up getting Zoom accounts for everybody. And the residual effects, we learned a lot. We learned a lot about access because living in New Hampshire, it's a lot of rural area. And I think about funding. If you're funding a home visitor in Tilton, they could be busy all day long and never leave 10 miles around where the center is. You're up in Plymouth, though, to go to Rumney or Campton or Ashland or that rural access, you might only see three people. And then you look at the numbers, and it's like, "Oh." And I think about that now in my position, because what do funders think when they say, okay, I can serve 10 people here, or I can serve three people here, but guess what? They still need the services. And when we went to offering digital platforms for things like parent education, we saw the access just increase again. We now do hybrid parent education classes, so people that want that in-person--they're really kinesthetic learners, they want that hands-on attention and stuff--can come, but if you're home and you've got your three kids in bed, and you can't take them out because they have to be in bed by 7:00 and parent ed goes till 8:00, they can now access that program. So I do feel like we do adapt as communities. I think the opioid crisis is another place where Family Resource Centers really had to adapt. I know Gorham trained all of their people and peer support services so that they would know how to work with families. You and I did training all over the state at one point because we had heard at a national conference somebody thinking that it was a smart thing to tell people to quit using opiates right away as soon as you find out you're pregnant, when we had heard the binge-and-withdrawal cycle is what is so dangerous for a fetus and that they need to get into medical services so they can get medical support as they withdraw from street drugs. Just thinking about that continuation of always being responsive, participant-driven.
Karen Welford 21:16
Yeah, absolutely. And I think that's really important when you think about, as you said, the opioid crisis, the whole idea of of integrating the two--peer recovery support and family support--was your vision, and that was in response to what you were seeing in the community. So, there are so many examples here in New Hampshire of that flexibility, of that responsiveness, that people can be very proud of.
Michelle Lennon 21:45
I think one of my favorites was--I think it is either Grapevine or the River Center--they have a woodshed and talk about concrete needs that are for the community. They have a community where a lot of people have wood stoves. They're not looking for help with a heating bill. Where I am, it's Dead River or Irving or something that's providing oil to them. It's: "We need wood for our fire, for our wood stove." And they have a woodshed.
Karen Welford 22:13
Yeah, that's amazing.
Michelle Lennon 22:15
Yeah, I love it. Flexible programs, right, that are about community need. And then the ninth principle is that principles of family support are modeled in all program activities, including planning, governance, and administration. So it's not just that we pay lip service to person-centered practice here. No, it's all throughout the organization and everything we do, in our forms and how we communicate with people. And I think the online hybrid system of delivering parent ed, that's an example of how we don't know it all, something happens, and then we adapt.
Karen Welford 22:51
I think that is also what I was talking about before, as far as governance and program development and having the organization actually reflect on that. How are we hearing from them around governance? Are they on the board? Are there board members who are family members? Do we have a way of listening to them around what program needs they have? Just a reflection on that is important.
Michelle Lennon 23:29
Yeah. And I was thinking, when we talk about the quality standards, too, the idea of taking data and actually doing something with it. Because at one time I'll say it felt like funders wanted all this data, but nothing was happening with it. And there was no point to it. And then when we got somebody in-house that loves data--that's our Joe, he loves data--and analyzes it for program improvement so we're constantly looking at that stuff. All of a sudden, surveys matter.
Karen Welford 23:59
That's right.
Michelle Lennon 24:00
And I think our Parent Cafes, our Recovering Together Cafes, every one of our parent ed programs, our Family Threads program--which intertwines family support and peer recovery support for families in recovery--how we do quite a few assessments.
Karen Welford 24:17
We do a lot of assessments.
Michelle Lennon 24:18
Yeah, because we want to know what we're doing is working for the family.
Karen Welford 24:22
And I think embarking on joining with Omni, which does a true re-evaluation, what we will learn from that will be so important. Yes, it will also hopefully get us to acknowledge that as evidence-based in the Family Threads program, but it will also give us some ideas of what we're doing with families and how we're making a difference. And that's just really important.
Michelle Lennon 24:57
Our Family Threads program, for those of you not familiar with it, the parent in recovery gets a recovery coach, and then the family as a whole gets a family support specialist to work with them. And this really came from being inspired from the movie "Anonymous People." And it eludes me right now, but Cheryle actually talked about this individual in our first podcast, somebody that was a Native American who told the story of a sick tree being put into healthy soil for 30 days and then put back into the same sick soil and expecting the tree to thrive. And so what our thought was, if we can get a peer recovery coach to help that individual thrive with their addiction health, and then a family support specialist to work with the entire family to build that family well-being,then everybody thrives. The kids thrive, the parent thrives, the co-parent thrives. But the idea is that these principles work...
Karen Welford 26:00
They do, you're right.
Michelle Lennon 26:02
...if they're put in place. But I think as we have moved more from an acute care model where we only looked at that individual for that acute care, recognizing that that doesn't really work, because recovery is a much bigger part of their life, that there's more of that work that needs to be done in the context of the family, which is what family support is all about.
Karen Welford 26:25
Absolutely.
Narrator 26:32
Thank you for listening to Archways Threads. If there is a topic you'd like to see us cover, email us at podcast@archwaysnh.org or call us at 603-960-2128. Visit our website at archwaysnh.org to learn more about the Archways family of recovery and family resource centers.