PRO-A

11/27/2025

Resource Links for helping those we serve get through the Holidays:

- Tips for Staying Sober During the Holidays Hazelden Betty Ford – Seven tips for staying sober, preventing relapse and avoiding the holiday blues. https://www.hazeldenbettyford.org/articles/tips-for-enjoying-sober-holidays

-10 Tips for Staying Sober During the Holidays – Recovery Research Institute - The holidays can be a fun and exciting time of year, but also a stressful and emotional time as well. Here are 10 quick tips for maintaining your sobriety, and sanity, during the winter holidays and into the new year. https://www.recoveryanswers.org/media/159-2/

- 37 Ideas to Help You Stay Sober During the Holidays – The Recovery Book – The holidays can be tough. You don’t have to let unfulfilled expectations, stressful family dynamics, or difficult in-laws threaten your recovery. You just need a bit of preparation. Start planning your strategy now. https://therecoverybook.com/sober-holidays-2014-1/

Discover expert tips from Hazelden Betty Ford to protect your sobriety, manage triggers and find support during the holiday season.

11/25/2025

Navigating Recovery over the Holiday Season

- Holiday tension can be palpable and overwhelming when a loved one struggles with addiction.
- Holiday festivities can still be inclusive if appropriate boundaries and precautions are taken.
- Social support is a powerful resource for people struggling with addiction and can motivate recovery.

Social support is a powerful resource for people struggling with addiction, so consider whether you really want to withhold that from someone during the holidays out of fear that could be mitigated. There is no one-size-fits-all boundary here, so it’s something to explore openly and honestly. What values do you want to embody? What messages do you want to send about how to respond to people who are struggling in their lives?

Article Link -

Expert guidance to foster compassion, kindness, and connection when navigating addiction in the holiday season and beyond.

11/20/2025

The Mindset That Helps People Recover from Addiction: New study points to seeing the world as a beautiful and interesting place. – Psychology Today

Enticing reflects a belief that the world is full of beautiful, fascinating, meaningful things, where something valuable might be found in every person, place, experience. In our study, this belief had the strongest association with recovery capital. On a scale from 0 to 5, most people score around 3.6 on Enticing. But participants in long-term recovery averaged 4.01. This is higher than almost any group that these primal world belief researchers had ever seen. In the context of recovery, my co-authors and I suspect that seeing the world as Enticing may help people notice opportunities for recovery and support, assuming value in the world around them. It may also influence how they interpret treatment or recovery meetings, viewing them as a source of hope rather than burdensome, and sustaining their curiosity and motivation throughout the long process of healing.

Link – https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/primal-world-beliefs-unpacked/202510/the-mindset-that-helps-people-recover-from-addiction?fbclid=IwY2xjawOJW5tleHRuA2FlbQIxMABicmlkETFXUWw1dDJHQjBPcE9NbTFsc3J0YwZhcHBfaWQPNTE0NzcxNTY5MjI4MDYxAAEeC-J1njp-HYuO-KLHPekuTFE3OvYUKUZrD5bOnBPKoTGbG-YBrOekElRaMkc_aem_fX9OtqXNR0cG0kDvx0_XZA

11/18/2025

Recovery Management Nestled in a Recovery Grounded System of Care – an Interview with Dr Michael Flaherty by William Stauffer

There was a momentous paradigm shift a generation ago as the new recovery advocacy created the impetus to move our care orientation from an acute model to a longer-term paradigm extending across and beyond our formal treatment system. It began to gain momentum around the year 2000. As you mentioned, one key concept was “recovery management” which holds that addiction should be understood as a chronic condition requiring long-term management, similar to diabetes or hypertension, rather than a series of isolated crises with acute interventional resolutions. The acute care orientation sadly remains the default method of our care system even today. The articulation of the model and efforts to motivate our institutions to consider the support of healing in a long-term comprehensive manner was revolutionary at the time. In many respects, it remains novel and revolutionary.

Article link - https://recoveryreview.blog/2025/10/29/recovery-management-nestled-in-a-recovery-grounded-system-
of-care-an-interview-with-dr-michael-flaherty/

Frontiers of Recovery Research Interview Series – William Stauffer What is this series of interviews? In April of 2024, I had the distinct honor of being asked by William White author and thought l…

11/17/2025

Join us on The CALL on Tuesday, November 18th! PRO-A's Patti Baranowski will have Guest Helen Diaz, a female Veteran speaking on Veteran's Accessing Treatment.

To Register for The CALL: https://zoom.us/meeting/register/tJwkc-yqpzkuE9zK4qvzHhf1N8EVXyZ_wGIs?fbclid=IwAR2wdT_5LAH5UqYn7RMwtXrZBCM5N54slnSl3UVCgAYN5w-Q7PYAbrdvCvs #/registration

What is it: PRO-A the statewide recovery community organization holds statewide weekly ZOOM call to support Recovery Community Organizations and members of the recovery community and strengthen recovery focused efforts across Pennsylvania.

All in PA are welcome to participate on THE CALL. Our Goals:

To understand what is happening to you, your organizations and your local community right now.

To support our fragile care recovery care system and support for our communities across Pennsylvania.

To help support each other and seek solutions for caring for ourselves and our community members as we strengthen recovery capital at the individual, family and community levels.

11/13/2025

Financial pain for many Pa. service providers will continue after budget impasse ends

Schools and nonprofits that provide critical services to Pennsylvania’s most vulnerable have not received billions in payments from the state over the past four months because of the budget impasse. That money will be released when lawmakers agree on a plan. But it won’t include interest, even though the state Treasury has earned $40 million as it sits unused. These organizations are in increasingly dire financial positions as the impasse continues, with some taking on
debt because of the stalemate. Others are cutting costs or tapping reserves to keep up with rent, salary, and utility payments. Administration officials, lawmakers, and those familiar with the state government said they were unable to comment on the issue or exceptions identified by Spotlight PA. For instance, state law mandates the government pay back small business contractors — companies that have 100 or fewer employees — with interest after an impasse. But that extra relief won’t reach many trying to survive without state money. And payments on debt that providers are forced to take on weigh down budgets and make it harder to deliver key public services, they told Spotlight PA.

Report link – https://triblive.com/local/westmoreland/financial-pain-for-many-pa-service-providers-will-continue-after-budget-impasse-ends/

Spotlight PA is an independent, nonpartisan, and nonprofit newsroom producing investigative and public-service journalism that holds power to account and drives positive change in Pennsylvania. Sign up for our free newsletters. HARRISBURG — Schools and nonprofits that provide critical services...

11/12/2025

The Social Model of Recovery: Where the Change Happens - William Stauffer, LSW, PMAC, PECS & Enid Osborne, PhD, MPH, MSW

Rather than positioning recovering people as passive recipients of professional clinical care, the social model recognizes that we are active agents who sustain our recovery by helping others (altruism) and engaging in strengthening connection, being visible ambassadors of hope, and living renewed lives of purpose. In collaboration with scholars such as Lee Ann Kaskutas, Borkman elaborated the Social Model of Recovery, an alternative to the traditional medical clinical
model of addiction treatment (Kaskutas & Borkman, 1998; Borkman et al., 1998). The Social Model of Recovery she helped develop emphasizes peer-led, community-based settings such as recovery residences, mutual aid groups, and
social model programs. These are environments where recovery is nurtured through participation, service, and shared responsibility.

link –

William Stauffer, LSW, PMAC, PECS & Enid Osborne, PhD, MPH, MSW In September, at the 2025 National Association of Recovery Residences Best Practices Summit, held in Sandusky, OH, one of the mos…

11/10/2025

Please note that there will be no Call on Tuesday, November 11th, in observance of the National Holiday - Veteran's Day. We extend our gratitude to all Military Veterans. The Call will resume on Tuesday, November 18th. We look forward to reconnecting with you then.

11/06/2025

5th Annual PA To***co-Free Recovery is Recovery Statewide Conference

Recovery is Recovery Virtual Conference. Join us for dynamic presentations by researchers, MCO leadership, treatment, and recovery advocates to advance to***co interventions in Pennsylvania’s behavioral health services. Robert K. Jackler, MD, Principal Investigator, Stanford University Research Into the Impact of To***co Advertising will provide a keynote presentation, Youlim Song from the National Council for Mental Wellbeing shares research on Trauma, To***co Use and Recovery and our PA STFRI team will provide an overview of the Behavioral Health MCO To***co Integration Project.

Date/Time - November 12, 2025, 12:30pm – 4:00pm EST. (virtually)

Learning Objectives

Upon completion of the conference attendees will be able to:
• Identify all PA STFRI education, training and messaging resources
• Describe to***co industry targeting that has led to high rates of to***co use in the behavioral health treatment and recovery community.
• Identify strategy to denormalize to***co use and advance recovery-oriented to***co use disorder interventions.

Registration/CE Credit
Register Here PA STFRI is supported by PA Department of Health so there is no registration fee. Completion Certificates are accepted by the Pennsylvania Certification Board for continuing education credits. Please distribute the attached save-the-date flyer within your network.

PA STFRI Website -

Learn about the Pennsylvania Statewide To***co-Free Recovery Initiative (PA STFRI) importance of integrating to***co use disorder treatment into behavioral health services.

11/04/2025

Drug Overdoses Are Skyrocketing Among Mothers. Why Is Rehab Unavailable? – The Marshall Project

April Lee was still functional in her opioid addiction, still walking her kids to school in Philadelphia, preparing her infant daughter’s bottles, when a sexual assault sent her teetering over the edge.She had been drugged at a bar and couldn’t identify her attacker. After going to the hospital for help, Lee received a referral to a r**e crisis center. But she couldn’t fathom peeling open the trauma, and rehab was also not an option. If she left for treatment, who would take care of her kids while she was gone? Instead, she coped the way she knew how — with substances.

Decades of research have shown that treatment programs that permit women to bring their children have better outcomes. About 70% of women struggling with addiction have children, and the lack of child care is one of the top reasons women cite for not seeking help. Yet, when it comes to treating their substance use, mothers face limited options.

In fact, I discovered that — since around the start of the opioid epidemic — the number of treatment facilities that cater to patients with children has drastically declined. As of 2023, fewer than 5% of all facilities nationwide provide child care for patients, and fewer than 3% allow patients to bring their children with them. Pregnant women are routinely turned away from treatment, while others face lengthy wait lists. These problems disproportionately impact Black women, who are much less likely than White women to enter treatment or receive addiction treatment medications. And with recent federal cuts to Medicaid and to addiction treatment that had been expanded during the pandemic, these shortages are likely to get worse.
Article link –

In her new book, ‘Rehab: An American Scandal,’ Shoshana Walter explores how the giant substance treatment industry keeps failing many people desperate for help.

10/27/2025

Join us on The CALL on Tuesday, October 28th!

To Register for The CALL: https://zoom.us/meeting/register/tJwkc-yqpzkuE9zK4qvzHhf1N8EVXyZ_wGIs?fbclid=IwAR2wdT_5LAH5UqYn7RMwtXrZBCM5N54slnSl3UVCgAYN5w-Q7PYAbrdvCvs #/registration

What is it: PRO-A the statewide recovery community organization holds statewide weekly ZOOM call to support Recovery Community Organizations and members of the recovery community and strengthen recovery focused efforts across Pennsylvania.

All in PA are welcome to participate on THE CALL. Our Goals:

To understand what is happening to you, your organizations and your local community right now.

To support our fragile care recovery care system and support for our communities across Pennsylvania.

To help support each other and seek solutions for caring for ourselves and our community members as we strengthen recovery capital at the individual, family and community levels.