Build On Belief is a LERO offering out-of-hours social connection support across London, Sussex and Buckinghamshire. Of course, when COVID hit in March 2020 we were forced to offer distance support and, within weeks of lockdown, launched an online programme of groups imitating what we offered face-to-face.
As social distancing measures were relaxed, the majority of services – LERO and treatment providers – moved back to face-to-face support. Build On Belief did as well – but we also kept the online programme due to the obvious unmet need we’d stumbled across.
To date we offer 40 activities a week, seven days a week, 365 days a year – no days off, including Christmas Day, with the groups starting at 9:30am and finishing at 6pm. Our challenge was to ensure what we offered stayed within the Build On Belief ethos.
What is that ethos? Well, we’re non-abstinence based. That doesn’t mean we advocate for using substances, but we recognise that recovery is a journey of many steps and the path is rarely linear. We allow anybody at any stage of recovery to access our online services, but we take safety very seriously – at the beginning of every group the participants are asked to name the boundaries and why they are important.
This is vital to showing us they understand, accept and own the boundaries, and it also allows the boundaries to be explored for clarification. One of them is our intoxication boundary – you’re allowed to attend, but a behaviour-based decision will be made to ensure other people aren’t triggered. Intoxicated people may be asked to turn their camera off and just listen, for example.
I’ve hinted at this already, but as well as being non-abstinent based we don’t advocate any single model of recovery. We have people who follow a 12-step model, some who follow more psychological styles, some who still use/drink – and are not judged for doing so – and some who are working towards their own targets.
Our groups don’t set the facilitators up to be ‘the expert’. Instead they empower peers to explore, and support and challenge each other, and we actively promote peer to peer feedback – it’s not just a place to ‘dump’ your thoughts and move on. What started as an online programme is now very much an online community.
In 2024 our community attracted more than 300 individual members and had around 1,400 attendances a month – this has actually increased since lockdown, when we had a captive audience! The key to this community is that we are entirely peer led. Facilitators have lived experience and the community is shaped by service user feedback. No over-intellectualising, no preaching from ‘experts’. What people ask for, we endeavour to give.
That has resulted in a wonderfully diverse range of activities. For example, on a Monday you could go to recovery coaching followed by Tai Chi (or a quiz, which is serious business here!) followed by ‘topic of the week’ and finish up with mindfulness meditation. On a Thursday you could have fun with the ‘wheel of mystery’, then the women’s group, then ‘daily dilemmas’ and end with recovery support. There’s something for everyone, but it’s not for everyone.
Why wouldn’t everyone benefit, I hear you cry. Because no recovery is the same and there is no single solution. Not everybody feels disconnected. Not everybody has accessibility problems. Not everybody struggles with their mental health. Not everybody works and needs out-of-hours support. So we’re ideal for the socially isolated, whether that’s through mental or physical health problems, people feeling disconnected or wanting to stay away from their current social networks, people trying to go to residential rehab, young parents and women who often struggle to get access to services, and anyone in between.
People don’t need to be in treatment and we’re not time limited – stay as long (or as short) as you’d like! And what are our impacts? As well as the quotes on this page – the voices of real people being the most important metric – in our 2024 impact survey our online participants self-reported a 71 per cent reduction in feelings of isolation, and an improvement of 54 per cent in mental health.
So there we have it. The Build On Belief online community offers a diverse and balanced range of activities, some serious and some fun, every day of the week including weekends and bank holidays. Perfect for people looking for a community who ‘get it’, and support without judgement.
Ben Houghton is head of research and online services at Build on Belief
