I’ll be totally honest right now: I had zero intentions of ever being a part of the Mobilize Recovery community. In fact, the only reason I attended a Mobilize Recovery event in the first place was because my first friend in the advocacy world, Pattie Vargas, asked if I was going to their event. It was the first time I heard of Mobilize Recovery.
Let me take you back: the year was 2020 (loud groan and booing from the audience). She mentioned that it was switched to a virtual convening and anyone could attend for free. I decided to take PTO from my corporate job because I had many days to burn and literally could not go anywhere fun to use them. At the time, I worked in IT as a Quality Assurance Analyst for a commercial insurance company (exciting, I know).
However, I had been doing family advocacy work in my spare time with Shatterproof since January 2019. I started with them because they were the first family advocacy focused organization I found after my brother, Marc, died of a heroin overdose on November 16, 2018. Until his death, I never spoke up about what he was going through for three reasons:
- I didn’t think it was my place to speak up on his behalf.
- I didn't want anyone to make any judgments about him and his substance use.
- I didn’t want anyone to judge my parents or family because of what Marc was going through.
One surreal memory I have of “advocacy” is going to my parents on the morning after he died and asking them if it was ok for me to say something on behalf of our family on social media because people kept “demanding” answers. It was so bizarre to be worried about defending my brother in the real world AND a digital world of people who felt they were owed an explanation or for some, gossip. However, at his funeral, my first piece of advocacy was the eulogy I wrote for him and that started my advocacy journey.
So, now that I’ve overexplained myself, let’s jump back to 2020 again (loud groans and more booing from the audience). I remember being so impressed with the content and speakers, but especially with the attendees. I was so self conscious about attending for three reasons:
- I am not in recovery. I am a person who uses drugs and utilizes harm reduction.
- My brother did not recover despite many attempts.
- I did not work in the recovery realm. I tested things on websites and told developers what’s not working.
However, what I could not have anticipated is the way everyone was so kind and no one cared about any of that. All the things I was self conscious about weren’t deal breakers to me being included in this community. In fact, I felt it was *too* welcoming because I lived in the corporate world and usually, super kind behavior means they’re about to dump work on you, steal your promotion, or they have bad news.
After that, I attended all the monthly training sessions, built some friendships with people, and eventually, Garrett and Aaron came to me about doing some part time work in early 2021. I was shocked to even be asked because I still did not see myself as someone who deserved this opportunity because of everything listed above. However, they saw something different.
I helped with state RAP (Recovery Advocacy Project) teams at first and I eventually left corporate right after Mobilize in Vegas 2021. In 2022, I started the Family Caucus (now Family Advisory Committee) with the amazing Denise Mariano and really established a space for education, learning, and open, respectful discussion around all topics - not just family focused advocacy.
In 2023, I ended up handling the scheduling/logistics for the DC event, where I got a crash course in large scale community organizing and event planning. I learned so much from that experience and afterwards, I was already thinking of ideas for 2024. Then we found out that we would be doing the bus tour again.
I’m gonna be totally honest again: I was not excited for a bus tour.
Well, let me rephrase: my overthinking, anxious brain was not excited for the coordination and logistics of a cross country bus tour. At first, all I could think was, “We’re gonna plan multiple events….across the country….with a different group of people in each city…with each event being unique to its city…and there’s three of us?”
Common Misconception #1: “Mobilize Recovery has a large staff.”
Truth: It’s Ryan, Garrett, Aaron, and me. That’s it. (side note: Courtney Gary-Allen has built ME-RAP into its own amazing entity and she now has her own staff - and surprise! They are small, but mighty too).
In case you didn’t know, Ryan was a *little* busy last year: he ran for office, met with all sorts of advocacy groups outside the recovery world, knocked doors for his own campaign, wrote a book, possibly worked on a cure for cancer? OK I’m just joshing on the last one, but you get my drift - Ryan is a busy man. However, he is a trusting, busy man and Garrett, Aaron, and I handled the tour planning. Thankfully, we also had Randy Anderson (from Bold North Recovery and megaphone fame) join us for a bulk of the stops as additional help and I was so happy to have another girl, Honesty Liller (from The McShin Foundation), for a couple of stops at the end.
There is a LOT that goes into planning of the tour. Thankfully, we partnered with a company who helped with prior Mobilize events and they handled all the bus and major event logistics: the mileage, time it takes to get from A to B, the tracking of driver hours, getting permits for venues, A/V if needed, etc. Garrett, Aaron, and I handled the rest with groups across the country.
Common Misconception #2: “The bus can just swing by my city on the way to another city and they could add more cities that way.”
Truth: No, we cannot. I would do endless laughing emojis here if I could. Just shifting a hotel location for one night to another hotel was almost the end of the world (I would take the time to explain, but if you ask me, Garrett, or Aaron about the great hotel fiasco of Myrtle Beach, we would instantly get irritated, but possibly laugh). Extra time and extra places means extra hours, extra hotel and travel cost, extra driving restrictions, extra gas, extra permits, extra money, etc. If we could stop in every state, we would, but alas: we have a budget and must adhere to it.
One thing that I really loved is that each of us got to have an event in our home city. Garrett is in Las Vegas, NV, Aaron is in Myrtle Beach, SC, and I am in Mesa, AZ. We all do organizing of some form in our own cities and we really wanted to highlight the work that our communities do. Therefore, I was in charge of the Mesa stop. We had another stop in Phoenix that I assisted with, but Mesa was my baby.
Remember how I mentioned that I had ideas that came from Mobilize in DC? Well, I decided to implement those ideas in my stop and do my own mini Mobilize. The theme of our stop was “Bridging the Gap: Celebrating Recovery, Harm Reduction, and Families.” I really wanted to highlight that all of these communities will be represented because some people may feel like me and don’t feel like they identify with just one community. I tell people all the time that I am a Venn Diagram of many things and sometimes, people are confused by me because I am a contradiction of too many things.
I am a family advocate who lost her brother to an overdose, but doesn’t support more punitive measures. I support someone who is fully abstinent in their recovery, but also support people who use drugs and harm reduction. Why? Because I am a person who uses drugs and utilizes harm reduction. I primarily do work in the recovery space, but I am not in recovery, nor have I ever considered myself recovering from anything except the loss of my brother.
My goal: let’s make this a melting pot of all the things and show how we are all still very connected with each other, despite our “identities” or roles. Thankfully, I have some amazing likeminded friends, who are their own amazing combo of things. I cannot thank all of them enough for the work they put into this event and could not have done this without them.
Tripti Choudhury and Kristen Tinsley are friends I made while doing street outreach with Shot in the Dark, a local syringe service program. I met Barbara Brown through some mutual friends, and she publishes a local recovery newspaper, Together AZ, and created the longest running annual recovery event in AZ, Celebrate the Art of Recovery Expo (CARE) with her late husband, Bill. I met Nathan Truitt-Morales via Oxford House and his partner, Ronny, is an amazing advocate and founder of WESOBERNOW. And finally, Jordan Brown is my husband and my biggest supporter of all the wild ideas I have.
For the final months leading up to the event, we met weekly and worked together to put all the pieces in place. We had the event at the ASU MIX Center in downtown Mesa and had somewhere between 250-300 people attend. Some of the highlights:
Resource Fair: a wide range of tables for harm reduction, abstinence based programs, housing, treatment, family support, substance exposed newborns and their moms, bail assistance, Hep C/HIV, etc.
Day of Service: attendees helped pack Naloxone kits for our friends at Sonoran Prevention Works.
Memorial Activity: a rock painting station was set up for attendees to paint something in honor of their lost loved one or encouraging words to leave in random places as little acts of kindness.
Inspire Talks: four people from the planning team shared their stories throughout the night.
Discussion Panels: Kristen Pendergrass from Shatterproof hosted a panel with public officials regarding new programs focused on transitioning from incarceration into recovery, offering access to treatment, housing, and job opportunities. I moderated the final panel around bridging the gap between recovery, harm reduction, and families with Nathan Truitt-Morales from Oxford House, Karla Castro-Soto from Partnership to End Addiction, Kylee Newgass from VEN Centers, and Jonathan Martinez from Giving Back AZ.
Mesa was one of the first stops on the tour, so once it was done, I felt like I could finally be present and enjoy the rest of the tour. I ended up going to the following stops after Arizona: Las Vegas, NV, Salt Lake City, UT, and then the entire east coast leg starting in Myrtle Beach, SC. One key thing we told all of the planning crews at each stop is that Mobilize Recovery wants to uplift the work and the people in these communities that do the work every single day. We always said, “The bus is the megaphone, but we want all of you to be the voices using it.”
Common Misconception #3: “It must be really glamorous and fun to be on a tour bus and travel across the country.”
Truth: On the bus between stops, we were all on our laptops, juggling meetings and work for the upcoming stops. If we weren’t working, we were taking naps and sharing the single pillow on the bus. I can’t even count the number of times we had to slam on some breaks and suitcases came flying out of cabinets that wouldn’t stay shut. The toilet in the bathroom broke at one point and was duct taped shut. So maybe not the most glamorous, but definitely fun when we were delirious.
There were moments at some of the stops that were so impactful to me and I just wanted to share a few of those before I close this out.
- In Las Vegas, country music artist, Whey Jennings, performed a few songs for everyone. For the final song, Recovery Band Camp (a group of people in recovery who play music together) joined him and acted as his band for the final song “Hallelujah.” Everyone on stage and in the audience sang along. I cried because a) I’m me, but b) there’s something about live music and how it can stir up the emotions. It was beautiful.
- After the event in Myrtle Beach, one of the people in our camera crew, Connor, had a drone and Aaron said that he got the Skywheel to light up purple for recovery month. Connor flew his drone out to the Skywheel and we all watched the footage on this tiny screen of this bright purple Ferris Wheel appear, with the boardwalk and ocean as the backdrop. I cried (obviously).
- We went to the Chesterfield County Jail in Virginia to visit with inmates who participate in their voluntary recovery program, HARP (Helping Addicts Recover Progressively). Everyone gathered in their outdoor recreation area and a few of the inmates led everyone in singing “Save Me” by Jelly Roll (who was previously incarcerated there). Again, something about live music stirs up so much emotion in me and I practically sobbed through the entire song (thank you Aaron and Randy for being so kind and comforting me).
- The final stop was a school in Springfield, VA and was hosted by the AMAZING Joseph Green from LMS Voice. Country music artist, Noah Thompson, joined us to play a few songs. I was already emotional about it being the end. However, there was a point where me, Aaron, and Garrett were standing there, realizing the end of it all, and we did a long group hug. I think all I could get out between my sobs were, “I think we did good.”
It’s only proper that I close this out with one of the last pics we took on the tour - which happened to be the first pic where just the three of us were in it. We got so caught up in these amazing, community led events that we forgot to pause and grab a memory of our little 3 person planning crew. This was a once in a lifetime experience and I am forever grateful to everyone who was involved in this. There were so many organizations and people that came together and it reminded me of the power of community - ESPECIALLY the Mobilize Recovery community.
There is no community without unity.