One Recovery Bury celebrates UK Recovery Month
One Recover Bury, Bury’s innovative drug and alcohol service, held a number of events in the last month to celebrate recovery from substance addictions.
UK Recovery Month celebrates the achievements made by individuals, charities and organisations in challenging stereotypes of substance addiction, and showing the positive results that can be achieved by working together to overcome addictions and the negative grip they have on many lives.
At One Recovery Bury we are proud of the way our service users transform their lives from being controlled by addiction, to hard-working and ambitious members of society. To honour their recovery, and give back to the community, they were heavily involved in organising and taking part in Bury’s efforts to celebrate UK Recovery Month.
The month’s activities started with the launch of the ‘ORB’, Bury’s first dedicated recovery centre; the ORB is the next step for individuals in early stages of abstinence to gain the skills and tools to move forward in their lives, embrace new opportunities, secure voluntary and paid employment and achieve a recovery suited to them. The launch of the ORB was an opportunity for service users and staff to highlight the importance of such services to the community and local partners and agencies.
Building on the success of the ORB launch, service users and staff organised an awareness event in Bury town centre, engaging with the public about the nature of addiction and how services such as One Recovery work to help people recover from substance abuse. The service users were particularly keen to breakdown the stigma associated with addictions, and show, with determination, how you keen beat addictions and build a better life for yourself and family.
Up next in the months activities was the UK Recovery Walk, held this year in Durham; the UK Recovery Walk, in its 7th incarnation, is an annual event moving around UK cities to highlight recovery, and bring communities across the UK together to celebrate their resolve in overcoming addictions. The Bury service users travelled to Durham as part of the contingent from the Greater Manchester Recovery Federation, and marched through the streets of Durham with their hand stitched recovery banner made by Bury service users ladies group.
The month long activities culminated with a community fun day at the ORB. Staff, service users, volunteers and local agencies, including, Narcotics Anonymous, BIG in Mental health and Bridging the Gap, gathered to highlight recovery in the community, with numerous games, face painting, BBQ, a bouncy castle and the highlight of the day, the recovery balloon release. Throughout all of Bury’s events and activities, people were asked to write a tag for a balloon, a message of hope, support or remembrance for those who have battled addiction, these were tied to purple balloons, purple being the colour of recovery, and were released into the sky above Bury to celebrate recovery from substance misuse.
The past months activities have really highlighted recovery to the communities of Bury, and show what can be achieved by working collectively to bring awareness to a cause that affects many in society. Service users have had an opportunity to grow and give back to the community, which will help them in their next steps in their recovery, and the past month has been a perfect showcase of the important work service like One Recovery Bury achieve on a daily basis.
We would like to thank Lis Ashton, One Recovery Bury’s Recovery Support Worker, for all the hard work she has put in with service users for organising the past months activities – without her and service users efforts, recovery from substance misuse would certainly have a lower profile in Bury.
