Recovery Community Development requires a multi-faceted approach:

• personal development and empowerment
• collective development and empowerment
• the growth of a community in which people in recovery feel connected to each other.

William White (United States recovery expert) identified a number of features of a strong recovery community. Our recovery community members have added their own comments to explain why recovery community is important to them:

• active efforts to reduce addiction/recovery-related stigma

“Stigma has a lot to do with it. So what Serenity has to do is educate that people in recovery are responsible and constructive members of society” (cafe customer)

• visible and diverse local recovery role models

“The Serenity Cafe is a great place to learn about relationships. I need things in my life, my life isn’t sorted, I need more than work in my life. It’s good for me to be about people who are healthy in recovery”. (volunteer)
“In early recovery I had a real fear of loneliness, of being alone, but to be with people, it needed to be people who shared the experience” (cafe customer)

• a full continuum of addiction treatment resources

“I think that the Serenity Cafe would be a really good tool for the recovery belt” (community survey)
“[recovery] didn’t happen in treatment, it happened when I started finding my place in life”. (volunteer)

• recovery mutual aid resources that are accessible and diverse

“It feels like being part of a community not just a part of a meeting. Serenity Cafe is making recovery visible”. (volunteer)

• local recovery community support institutions

“Lifesaver, proves there is an excellent night out without alcohol” (customer feedback)
“Mainly I think Serenity Cafe is a great idea and good for the whole community, I feel it’s like service and it builds my self esteem” (volunteer)

• sources of sustained recovery support and early re-intervention

“To have a safe haven is essential to continued recovery” (volunteer)
“Serenity Cafe is about how to live life outside meetings in the real world” (cafe customer)

Community development is about addressing the underlying structural causes of social problems, and their distressing consequences, in order to reduce uncertainty and insecurity in people’s lives.  It encompasses attention to the material and spiritual needs of people, both their needs and their aspirations. It requires a democratic approach in which intentions, and the ways of achieving them, must be transparent and accountable to the people whose lives they touch. People recovering from addiction are amongst the most marginalised in Scottish communities. They are rarely described within mainstream society as people with hopes, dreams and rights to the opportunities to realise these. This is why personal and collective empowerment achieved through community development is key to realising their rights. Community development is a rights-based approach, but goes beyond an individualistic, service-driven view of rights, which the array of addiction treatment services tend to focus on.
The United Nations described ‘empowering people as the main objective of development and its principle resource’ (UN, 1995). This resource can only be fully realised if people participate in every stage from formulation of ideas, implementation and evaluation of all decisions and contributions to the functioning and wellbeing of their lives. 

Community development is a slow movement, rich in learning and experience. Whilst many people are sharing our learning and hoping to develop recovery cafes in their own area, if they use a community development approach each cafe will be unique – it will be a product of local ideas, needs and cultures. We know that the pressure for quick results has been the cause of many of the most inappropriate initiatives – and of replications that are inappropriate and based on flawed or inadequate evidence of the ingredients of success.

The Serenity Cafe has embodied the acorn principle: spending time growing strong roots, before branching out.