This week (April 20th 2011) , we will announce which organisations have signed up under the SMART Recovery UK Partnership scheme.  This is an important milestone and very exciting for SMART Recovery.

With this model in place, we would also like to go public with our goal for there to be over 400 SMART Recovery meetings per week in the UK within three years. These meetings will be high quality and peer led. 

Based on the history of SMART Recovery in this country (or indeed in any other country) there is no reason to believe that this kind of growth could be achieved purely from the ‘organic’ growth of people moving from participating in one meetings to starting another.   This will always be something we value and support, but it is hard to replicate across the country and has not worked well outside of the north-west. 

The break-through for SMART Recovery was the Alcohol Concern pilot scheme where we found that just six partnership sites blossomed into twenty five free-standing peer led meetings over a two year period. Far from undermining peer led mutual aid, the partnership model encouraged it to flourish.  Amazingly, most of the current SMART Recovery meetings in the UK owe their ‘ancestry’ to this small number of sites in the Alcohol Concern pilot.

We must not ignore that kind of success!   

If that is what can happen from just six sites, what about forty sites?  That is how many sites SMART Recovery UK has now agreed with a number of treatment providers.  We are aiming for 100 partner sites within the next six months and more beyond that.  If the scheme is only a fraction as successful as the Alcohol Concern pilot we will easily achieve the 400 weekly meetings within three years.

Under the Partnership model there will also be SMART Recovery within treatment services that may not always be peer led, but this enhances rather than detracts from the wider network of meetings. ‘SMART Recovery Champions’ - professionals who have done the facilitators course will introduce literally thousands of people to SMART Recovery who would otherwise never come across it and encourage many dozens of these to become facilitators and start their own meetings.

The other benefit of the Partnership approach is that it brings in some revenue - and SMART Recovery UK has no other source of income. We have now turned the corner on our precarious finances and are confident that the organisation is here to stay. 
Although the Partnership scheme has taken a lot of work to put in place, having a bit of stability and being able to pay a few bills will directly benefit our growing network of peer facilitators.  Work is already underway to review and improve the manuals and handbooks; we should be able to print posters and the other materials that will help local meetings and hopefully run more training, events and conferences to support facilitators.

SMART Recovery is an unusual animal in the Recovery movement as it has always been a partnership between people in Recovery and treatment professionals.  To some, this collaborative approach might seem to be a threat to the ‘purity’ of the recovery movement. Certainly we have had to put safeguards in place to make sure SMART Recovery cannot be misused by others, but with these safeguards in place we should be truly grateful that Commissioners and provider organisations want to see SMART Recovery spread and are prepared to step up and do things to help make this happen. This is truly a ‘win-win’ approach that benefits both peer led mutual aid and the providers and users of treatment.