GUEST BLOG: Larry Leach is Executive Director of 12 Community Safety Initiative (12CSI), a non-profit crime prevention collaborative in Calgary, Canada, one of the initial sponsors of the 2015 SafeGrowth Summit. In 2018 12CSI won the Alberta Solicitor General's Award for Community Collaboration and the Ambassador program won it in 2022. Larry has been a Huffington Post blogger and is involved in the SafeGrowth Network. He was awarded with the Queens Diamond and Platinum Jubilee medals for his contributions to community-building.
Addiction and Mental Health issues continue to tear apart families and communities. As a follow-up to my previous blog, “Scale is good for economies, but is it good for social policy?", I wanted to dive a bit further into what should investment and engagement with communities look like.
It is important to know a little bit more about how people have managed to come out of severe addiction. Wisdom among those who have had success in this space teaches us how addicts need a strong support system. They conclude that the opposite of addiction is connection. This is a central tenet of the neighborhood-building strategies in SafeGrowth. The research on addiction and recovery points to the same conclusion. Watch the Ted Talk video at the top of this blog.
The missing and most important piece of the puzzle is the same for helping agencies tasked and funded to help vulnerable individuals. In this case, addiction is the belief that you and your organization are the experts on how to get out of addiction, instead of helping people build healthy lives based on their own individual, personal, circumstances. Agencies wanting to complete that task need to strongly consider a holistic approach that includes connection to the communities in which they work.
PAY ATTENTION TO LOCAL SOLUTIONS
There are times when community organizations arise organically to deal with addiction and we must do everything possible to nourish those locally-based solutions.
For example, consider the recent blog on the City of Prince George, British Columbia nurse, Jordan Stewart (our 2023 SafeGrowth Person of the Year), and her now-closed harm reduction site for inhalation addicts. Her effective local solution was defunded, illustrating how easy it is for city leaders to squander the local talent and solutions right at their own doorstep.
Clearly, we must do better in the future.
INVESTING IN OUR NEIGHBOURS
Investing time into your neighbours has always paid large dividends. When community support is needed, it will arise with full enthusiasm and the knowledge to work with community members. In turn, communities can support vulnerable individuals better by having strong bonds with the services that can help people within their own communities. This is the essence of the concept of capacity-building.
Like most things in life, you get out of it what you put into it. Long-term investments of time and energy into the neighbourhoods across the city will pay huge dividends in the long run. Building relationships and trust goes a long way in achieving the outcomes that everyone wants. How much time does it take? Greg Saville echoes the mantra of community development workers when he says: “We go at the speed of trust”.
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