This Is About People
In August 2024, I was asked to come on the Surviving Bad Podcast hosted by Peter Komendowski with the Partnership for a Healthy Iowa to promote the 2024 Mobilize Recovery Bus Tour (and specifically the October Iowa Event with the Bus.) At this point, we were just a few months into planning the Bus Tour with our local partners across the country to tell a different story at each stop or highlight a different issue impacting those communities.
Iowa was just one of 27 stops in which the Mobilize Recovery Bus Tour set out to change the way America thinks about and responds to recovery and highlight what issues are impacting each community.
When Peter from the podcast asked me to do a twenty second hype video piece to promote the actual podcast, he asked me straight out what the Mobilize Recovery Bus Tour was about. Knowing this was a twenty second exchange, my brain went into a deer in headlights mode as it quickly scanned through language I knew was on the Mobilize Recovery website. I could have given a spiel about how Mobilize Recovery was about thinking and acting locally (which it is) I could have gone into how Mobilize Recovery is about giving people the tools to create their own social changes they want to see within their communities or states (which it is). However, I knew the video piece was just a few seconds long to promote the actual podcast, so I found myself saying,
“This is about you. This is about people.”
Mobilize Recovery did a coast to coast Bus Tour back in 2022 and then again we went coast to coast in 2024. Each time we announced the tours, we always would get the question, “Well, who is on the bus?” I always felt like responding that the tour is not really about who is on the bus. To me, it is simply about the people that come to witness the bus and be a part of solutions at their local event.
From the Surviving Bad Podcast: Aaron Kucharski
Aaron: “This event (Iowa) is created by the people that go to it. That’s part of the magic of this. These events are open to anyone. You do not have to be in recovery from alcohol or substances to come, you just have to , well (laughs) you don’t have to anything… but you know, a lot of us are healing from something.”
In the three weeks, the Mobilize Recovery Bus Tour went 4300+ miles across the country and engaged thousands of people in recovery, impacted family members, first responders, mental health advocates, harm reductionists, allies, and even dogs (yes, there actually was a puppy adoption component to the Castle Rock, CO event).
Mobilize Recovery co-founder Ryan Hampton said he wanted to wrap a 43 foot bus in recovery messaging and send it across the country for people to sign with messages of hope and inspiration. Nobody could have predicted the connections, moments, or the stories that we came across on the tour.
This blog post (and more to come throughout 2025 from all different authors) is a look at the tour from participants and Mobilize staffs’ eyes before, during, and after the tour. It started with a huge kickoff event at (the appropriately named) Friendship Auditorium in Los Angeles on September 20th and turned into the crowding the streets in Washington DC on October 11th. We will do our best to relay some of these stories no one could have anticipated in these posts.
From the Surviving Bad Podcast :
Aaron : “You can organize and organize and organize (right?!”) and you think it's going to be one thing, but it’s the moments, and connections that are built at each one of these stops, and it is the time that people take to spend time with the bus in reading what is on there (you know) write your own note, that creates these special moments for people that they are going to remember forever.”
I have been in recovery since September 6th, 2003 from alcohol and drugs. The thing I constantly share with people in recovery is no matter where they are in their process, I have these moments in recovery that I wouldn’t trade in a million years for my formerly favorite drug or drink. I think a lot of my recovery is seeking out those remarkable moments to remember why I’m on my own journey. I witnessed so many special moments on this tour that reminded me why my favorite drink or drug doesn’t stand a chance today. These Bus Tour Blog Posts are an attempt to share out those meaningful moments, knowing there were hundreds of others experiences that some people weren’t able to catch for one reason or another.
On the actual podcast, Peter asked me if I had any insights I wanted to leave with his Iowa audience about the bus tour before I got off the podcast.
Aaron : “This is something that I think about all the time in my own personal recovery, and I think it translates to what we are doing with this Bus Tour. There is this cornerstone of recovery that one person can help another, or people can be responsible for healing their communities and being a part of the solution, and so the thing that I like to think about alot is that ripple effect.
“I lost my stepfather in May of last year. He was the first person that brought me to a mutual support group meeting, he was the first person that would have conversations with me about recovery, and he passed from cancer, but I share this because of the things he taught me in terms of being kind to others, helping other people, listening to people. It lives inside of me. So I try to keep that close in the interactions that I have because I talk to a lot of people in recovery. I talk to a lot of people that are using drugs, people that are still struggling with mental illness, and a lot of people that are dealing with housing and health care insecurities, and I listen to them because I think a lot of times… people do not.
“So I hold that value and remember that there is that ripple effect because if he (my stepfather) didn’t have those conversations with me twenty something years ago, then I don’t know… I may not be talking to you. And he passed away with over thirty years in recovery, and passed away peacefully with a life fulfilled in which he was able to teach others around him, so I take that on a personal level of that ripple effect, but I also think about it in terms of community organizing and the Mobilize Recovery work that we do because you just don't know what can be inspired at these events. You don’t know who is going to meet who, and who is going to go on to do great things just because a bus rolled around and somebody got curious about it.“
To me, there is a big difference between what I do for my own personal recovery and what we do together in the Recovery Advocacy space. Recovery (for me) is personal, sometimes private, and requires me looking at some heavy shit in my life and how I can do right by others. For me, it involves meditation, dream work, connecting with other people in recovery, surfing, and time with my cat, Charlotte. I know for a fact that it is drastically different from what someone else’s recovery looks like and that’s how it should be. There is no cookie cutter way to heal up. You do you.
Recovery advocacy, on the other hand, is about helping people I may never meet in my life. I can advocate for Naloxone (overdose reversal medicine) to be put in every hotel in Myrtle Beach (where I currently live) or advocate for a Recovery High School in New Jersey. And yet, I will never meet those students 10 or 20 years down the road or know whose life was saved with the Naloxone in a hotel on the beach during someone’s family vacation.
The first story I want to share with you all in this Blog Post was an unexpected conversation I had in Oak Ridge, Tennessee after our event there. As amazing as the Oak Ridge event was, this story from the morning after captures that element of nobody could have imagined the impact of the Recovery Bus.
I preface the following story with two tidbits: We stay in hotels (everyone thinks we sleep on the Bus -we do not) and Uncle Bob is our bus driver (he’s got some amazing stories too, but that’s an entirely different blog post some day).
Oak Ridge , Tennessee - October 6th
I was coming from my hotel in the morning after my seventh consecutive continental breakfast with Uncle Bob. I was definitely running on about seven hours of broken sleep in the past two days. I relied on my crappy in-room hotel coffee to get me downstairs at the hotel. Then my less crappy cup of coffee from breakfast to get me to the bus, which I learned pretty quickly on the trip, has stronger coffee (and oat milk). The sun hit my face right as I was walking out and I usually take some time each morning to just breathe fresh air and nothing more. I noticed a few people walking their dogs by the bus at the hotel. So, there I was, breathing and waking up, and I walked over to a woman who had a young dog, ready to be petted. The bus at this point had already been from California to Tennessee, so it had thousands of hope instilled messages and recovery dates written all over it. Each day, I would myself loop around the bus and just read the messages. I would discover new messages that hit me in an inspiring way, so I was always curious about how others responded to it.
The Recovery Bus has a way of inviting complete strangers to share space with one another. As I am talking with this woman about the event we had in Oak Ridge the night before, and as I am petting her dog, she mentioned she drove by the event and saw the bus the day before and was happy to see it ended up at her hotel. I asked her why she was in Oak Ridge and it turns out she was in town because her husband is from the area. He recently passed away and was in town for his services. Having spent the majority of the past year healing up from my Stepfather’s death and seeing my Mother lose the love of her life, I saw this woman holding her own in describing her loss. My eyes behind my sunglasses were tearing up a bit, listening as she continued. If the death of her husband wasn’t enough, she then shares with me that she also lost her home to Hurricane Helene the previous week and she was staying in the hotel with just her dog.
“It’s just me and Jo. That’s all I have now. She is always by my side and stays with me in bed at night.”
As I am looking at this woman, who in her past week had lost so much of what she loved, I noticed that she was seemingly holding things together pretty well. She appeared to be in okay spirits considering the circumstances. I had even noticed a smirk on her face. Grief is a tricky crapshoot of how people deal with loss, so I tried not to read too much into it. However,it got me thinking about how we are all recovering in so many ways - and here we are, the two of us standing next to this enormous bus with the words “Mobilize Recovery” on it.
“I am sorry to hear about your husband. I can’t even imagine what you're experiencing all at once. You seem like you and your dog are holding up ok together.”
to which she responded
“Yes, I think I’m ok. I have been reading this bus for the past fifteen minutes. I am just glad there is something positive happening here right now.”
I invited her to add her message of hope to the bus and she was pleased to sign it for herself and Jo. This story really changed how I thought about the bus. To my knowledge, she had no connection to addiction recovery (at least in what she chose to share), but really understood that thousands of eyes will be on this bus on this tour and she can write something hopeful for another. I like to think about who later on in the tour may have been inspired by what she wrote. She understood the ripple effect.
Thank you to the many people and organizations who took the time and energy to help organize these events and participants who took the time to make their mark on the bus. You created something lasting and memorable. You helped someone you may never meet in person and that is how this works.
I hope that this is just one of many stories by different authors to be shared here in the Mobilize Recovery Blog for others to see.
“This is about you. This is about people.”
