Hello, my friends. I want to make sure you know you are invited to our big fundraiser party!! And I’d love to tell you the story of how it all came together. And why it’s important. I know you’re busy and reading emails maybe isn’t your favorite thing ever, but please hear me out in this one.
First, the nuts and bolts:
Now, the insider info.
Funding a non-profit is… really hard. When I first started out, people told me that.
I thought, “Well. Fuck that. I’m doing something really innovative and important and people will be thrilled to give me grants for filling this needed gap in society and I’m a great writer and I’ll work really hard and it’s gonna be fine!!”
So I wrote grant after grant, and to my surprise and disappointment, I was rejected for all of them. Eventually, I got a few micro-grants, and when I did it felt strangely like winning the lottery. Like gambling instead of working.
Why do I have to do the work of running the nonprofit and then have to have a second job of convincing Grant Advisory Boards (humans, presumably?) that I deserve to be paid for my work? And since I’m not making any money with these two jobs, do I also have to get a third job in my spare time that actually guarantees me an income? Wouldn’t it just be easier if I got paid to do the work in the first place?
Throughout the past two years of providing non-religious addiction recovery services to our community, I’ve had so many heartbreaking conversations. I booked a room at the library, and the person who emailed me back told me about her mother dying of an overdose. I made a bank account for the nonprofit, and the teller confided in me that he was thinking about coming to our support groups.
We are all affected by people who are suffering from addiction, especially folks from historically marginalized communities, and that the pain radiates into all of our lives.
The people who make it to our offerings are in crisis. We are a safe place for people whose lives are falling apart, who need other people, who feel alone, and who have nowhere else to go. Religious programming is ubiquitous, and for a lot of us those environments are somewhere between repulsive and unsafe. The state of healthcare in the US is abysmal, and the idea of taking time off of work to go inpatient at a detox or treatment center is unfeasible for most people.
The people using our services are your friends and neighbors. They are your siblings and parents. They are your employees that keep your business running. They cook your dinner, they are your librarians, your lawyer, they keep your groceries stocked, they build and repair your home, they are your nurses and EMTs, they are the musicians you love to see on stage, and they need this community to heal and to survive.
At Recovery Demystified we provide a safe, soft place to land for queer people, disabled folks, BIPOC community members, women, and people who are justice-involved. No other addiction recovery organization is prioritizing the people who are most affected by the chronic discrimination of our modern political landscape. What happens behind closed doors at our support groups is an immense transmutation of collective pain, growth and interconnection, and the re-creation of self and community that ripples out into a healing force into everyone else’s lives.
I’m telling you right now that the energy of transforming this pain is enough work in itself. The added stress of trying to convince people to give us money to fund the life-saving and life-affirming work that we already do is too much. We need to be able to use this energy to help people heal.
That’s why I was so excited to meet Hannah Withers. She is a local small business owner, and as I was sort of hopelessly going around to business owners asking them to help fund our programs, feeling like I was just yelling into the void, she actually engaged in an authentic way that I had not experienced before. She truly believes in giving back to the community, and she got together a group of amazing organizers to plan this fundraiser for us. This is what support actually looks like. Support is not virtue signaling on social media. It is showing up for what you believe in in a concrete measurable way.
Capitalism is a fucking drag, because it rewards people for exploiting each other and the earth. Nonprofit work is a fucking scam because it assumes that helping others should be entirely unpaid volunteer work, thus inhibiting our ability to actually make real change.
I get it – every time you look at the internet someone is asking for money. Capitalism teaches us to clutch our money in fear, and people of all income levels embody this sense of scarcity. I recently read this quote that I think we could all benefit from embodying: “To me, money is a lot like water. For some folks it rushes though their life like a raging river. Money comes through my life like a little trickle. But I want to pass it on in a way that does the most good for the most folks. I see that as my right and my responsibility. It’s also my joy.”
My dear reader, I would love to enjoy the dinner and music and magic of the upcoming Farm Party with you. Please get your tickets here!
And if you can’t make it, but you believe in our mission to empower people to create their own unique paths to addiction recovery, you can donate via our website. The most helpful thing is to sign up for a recurring monthly payment of $5-$20/month so we know we have something to rely on.
If you want, you can subscribe to this Substack for $8/month, or join us on Patreon for exclusive content and a community of like-minded folks on the path to recovery.
Please also consider supporting The Library Vintage, who offers us a free space to host our support groups.
If you want to follow along on our journey, or see all of the events we put on to bring our community together, follow us on Instagram.
Please share our work with anyone who you think would benefit from our services! And please share the donate link with anyone who you think would like to support us.
Thank you, dear reader. May you be happy and free.
Announcements and such:
Support groups are still every Monday at The Library Vintage in Fayetteville, AR!
November is chock-full of exciting and fun new ways to connect, see the following flyers for details!
I’m still available for 1:1 Recovery Coaching, and have a few spots open right now! Click here for more info!
This week on the podcast, I talk with Dean Spade about sex/love/work addiction. Click here to listen.
Want to connect? Send an email to info@recoverydemystified.com
