Finding space amongst jostling perspectives and competing priorities is an ongoing challenge for the humble LERO. With daily funding pressures and strains on capacity (more than 3,000 individuals came through our door last year and we’re a micro-organisation) day-to-day working life is never dull. Yet we need to be operating effectively as a calm antithesis to active addiction, not running around appearing to mirror its stresses and strains. How is this achieved?
In a field seemingly willing to ultra-process basic ingredients, it can be helpful for LEROs that are growing up in a sometimes-frightening world to remember core values, beliefs and skillsets. Broadly, these values include maintaining a belief in the wisdom of community – having a faith that often, with the right setting and oversight, people coming together voluntarily in the social setting will unlearn addiction’s teachings of helplessness.
The emphasis on supportive social processes within positive networks is a belief system also known by another name – mutual aid.
LEROs’ understanding of the importance of setting the social scene comes with good reason. We know most of us learnt to start taking drugs and alcohol in a social environment, so why not start learning to stop in one? Adhering to a focus on the psychologically informed environment – which, in less convoluted talk, means generating recovery from the living room – is a valuable LERO USP.
RETAIL RECOVERY
This leads on to acknowledgÂing the importance of creating an independent home for recovery in the community, offering open access and high street visibility – retail recovery! Based in a home-grown community rehab, LEROs build a social, principled space where anyone can walk in and immediately sit down to talk with someone with lived experience of services, addiction, harm reduction and recovery. LEROs can offer a warm welcome, independent space and a sense of belonging.
Operating this way in the community – away from burgeoning bureaucracy, the more extreme examples of stifling risk-averse practices and the umbilical cord of bigger providers – the independent LERO remains free to talk truth to its members, and truth to power.
The ABCD approach is a further, articulate example of how LEROs, as freelance frontline providers, can remain nimble, responsive (and entrepreneurial), staying one step ahead by harnessing available assets within local community networks – assets, for some reason, which seem beyond the reach of more established services. The willingness and ability to expand into cross-sector networks will add further dimensions and opportunities for LEROs to establish themselves and help more people. We work with the University of Leicester for example, sourcing apprenticeship funding for staff development and accessing other benefits for development, such as participating in their insightful growth accelerator for social entrepreneurs programme.
PARTNER ACCESS
LEROs are clearly in strong positions to advance social care within the community. During our ‘Dridays’ – beside the graduations, music, written word and shares – we offer eye tests, fibro scanning, smoking cessation, BBV tests and more, provided by our partners. Working in partnerships provides access to people, places and things you’d be hard pushed to reach on your own.
The forging of productive working relationships within our shared arena – the pooling of thinking, perspectives and other resources – is not only sensible, pragmatic and often cost effective, it can establish the transformative change that users of statutory services so deserve.
Coming from the lived experienced perspective, this means building on the cooperation process and tapping into useful networks so many of us found helpful when addressing the crushing consequences of our own addictions. The same assets applied to build our personal recovery capital are scaled up in the professional capacity to build the improved infrastructure across service delivery that’s so sorely needed. Embedding within successful partnerships is a key tactic for allowing LEROs to survive, prosper and grow.
Of course, espousing the benefits of effective partnership work is nothing new. But where the recovery city landscape is ever more mapped with different contributors and locations, what’s become essential now is how these organisational relationships come together to present a cohesive whole. Limiting harm happens when working alliances orientate towards supportively navigating recipients’ pathways through an often-bumpy terrain. This navigation is achieved through increased liaison and understanding of the different roles, including who is where and who does what, creating a streamlined momentum towards improved outcomes.
Maturing LEROs can play an active role in this work, advocating, as always, from the service user’s perspective. This model might still be a way off from effective personalised treatment plans, but does create a joined-up infrastructure which supports a more tailored approach. Attaining capacity for the LERO to be a leading contributor in this role is vital if we’re serious about progressing lived experience and improving outcomes.
SMALLER PARTNERS
Participating in partnerships where members are eager to learn from each other has allowed us – as the relatively new kids on the block – to become better understood and influential. We can now learn from the master’s table, or at least the status of being invited to properly sit down has been attained.
It’s empowering for us to know we’re getting somewhere, albeit for now as a smaller partner. It’s a huge responsibility. However, establishing such working partnerships can form a vital part of the LERO journey towards what is slowly becoming parity of esteem with the bigger, more established players.
Partnerships have certainly been a cornerstone of our community build. The partnership between Turning Point and Dear Albert has evolved to become multifaceted and well-integrated, providing good examples of how LEROs can work alongside the main provider and how established providers can support the LERO.
Turning Point and Dear Albert work together in Leicester on a daily basis, sharing data, venues and expertise. Turning Point holds overall control of the Leicester substance use contract, enabling Dear Albert to perform targeted lived experience roles and lead on certain initiatives. Locally, Turning Point provides regular training to Dear Albert members including naloxone distribution and needle exchange, so there’s increased opportunity to spread support across a larger area.
SHARING WORKSPACE
Dear Albert manages Turning Point’s aftercare caseload and leads on service user involvement, as well driving significant initiatives, such as establishment of Leicester’s community rehab. The partnership includes the sharing of workspace, co-facilitation of groups and attending each other’s meetings. This might be Turning Point accompanying our morning ‘huddles’ or popping into the senior lead meeting, or giving us access to training portals and conducting extensive audits – I’m now aware of expiry dates of bandages in the first aid boxes! More seriously, our Turning Point partnership has created buy-in and an urgency that we must get up to speed.
Whether appointing a designated safeguarding lead, or rewriting our standard operating procedures, the partnership has allowed us to become more professional. They want us to do well, and we want to show we can.
Close collaboration on event planning, such as Alcohol Awareness Week and September’s recovery festival, creates convergence on messaging and tangible unity across the contract. We contribute to Turning Point’s ARC (alcohol resolution clinic) and MAP (managing alcohol programme) based at our Community Rehab Stairway Project.
Dear Albert’s lived experience practitioners contribute to needle exchange at a local Turning Point hub, with Turning Point workers conducting 1-2-1s at one of our consultation rooms. We work together with ongoing feedback and alongside commissioners on such things as future city-wide strategies to combat harms.
We also deliver the recovery and community session as part of Turning Point’s peer mentor training, and we employ Turning Point peer mentors – playing our part in providing real paid employment to those with lived experience of addiction. This commitment to working together towards common objectives and leveraging the strengths of each other while mitigating weaknesses and blind spots creates effective teamwork – a synergy to enhance opportunities for those we serve.
Having a partnership that works well in Leicester and Leicestershire has provided a secure base on which to understand what works well and then share with other areas – we’re thrilled and grateful to be sharing what works well with a wider audience.
CAN-DO ATTITUDE
Partnerships incorporating independent LEROs – who can often bring a fresh can-do, solution-focused attitude to the table, with genuine lived experience and community credentials – working alongside those with robust clinical excellence, the required safeguarding standards and the lived experience of actually running services, will bring about the transformative change we all know needs to come.    Â
Whether the independent LEROs will remain forever the smaller partner and lived experience becomes better represented by being absorbed into the main providers’ personas, or LEROs thrive to become serious, rounded competitors on their own merit, time will tell.
In the meantime, if LEROs are truly going to reach second-generation status, pull away from the founder’s image, learn from mistakes and help more people, then remaining true to our core values and strengths, while integrating our skillsets into wider partnerships, is a strategy that might just work. I truly hope so. We’ve got scaffolding going up for a new roof, and I’ve just signed a five-year lease.
Jon Roberts is director at Dear Albert