The Kennedy Street
Community Recovery Hub
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Making recovery more visible.
Our new Recovery Hub will be the home for all our work at Kennedy Street. From drop-in sessions, fellowship meetings and sober socials, to business-for-good and volunteer training, our Hub will be a welcoming home from which to support the community and promote recovery in Brighton and beyond.
Our ongoing commitment.
Since 2017 Kennedy Street Recovery has been helping the recovery community to both start and maintain their journeys. We kept this going through the pandemic by moving all of our activities online and setting up the Helpline in response to a massive need at the time.
This need is ever-increasing in light of all the pressures life throws at us. We are responding again by opening our Hub as a physical, face-to-face, IRL place for people to come and engage with us and the work we do.
The Kennedy Street Community Recovery Hub
Why are we setting up the Hub?
The cost of addiction is high for individuals, their families and society in general. The people we support have complex interlinked needs, for example, mental health issues associated with being a victim of domestic violence, and have a range of addictions from alcohol and drugs, to sex, gambling or food.
Addicts are often stuck in a cycle of addiction, treatment and then falling back into addiction. This happens when they are unsupported in their recovery and they feel they don’t have a positive future to look forward to.
The Hub will provide a visible, very accessible point of contact for many people first looking for recovery. It will then be a safe, welcoming space for anyone in recovery, offering all the support and coaching of Kennedy Street Recovery in this permanent home.
How will the Hub help solve these problems?
The Kennedy Street Hub provides a safe space for people to find out about recovery options and to come together to meet and learn from peers who are in recovery.
We offer recovery support and coaching, workshops to help personal development and future employment potential, and there are always volunteering opportunities to help others.
We work intensively with people, giving wrap-around support to help them sort out sometimes chaotic lives, and mentoring and coaching to help them sustain their recovery.
What We do
Run a weekly Families in Recovery day where families with a loved one looking to recover, can access peer recovery support, talk to people and families who have been through similar issues, and access music, filmmaking, or healthy eating workshops.
Training volunteers with lived experience of recovery to become Recovery Coaches, who will then lead daily workshops supporting others into and through the recovery process.
Support the running of our helpline which took 2,487 calls last year and is open every day to provide information about local routes to recovery. We will train more volunteers to run the helpline and support people trying to access help.
A drop-in cafe area for people to discover support and find out about how recovery can work for them.
What will be the impact of the Hub?
By giving Kennedy Street a dedicated home the Hub will increase the number of activities we host. In turn, this will mean we are more effective as an organisation, in helping people into recovery. The direct impact on that process will be three-fold:
Sustained recovery from drug and alcohol addiction by bringing people into a peer support community.
Improved mental health and physical wellbeing – by coaching and mentoring people we can improve underlying negative issues.
Greater awareness of local support networks and professional services – to help maintain and sustain recovery it is vital that people are aware of and integrated into existing drug and alcohol fellowships and community support.
How we measure success.
‘Success’ means different things to people depending on where they are in life. We are mindful of how expectations vary and always take individuals’ needs into account when evaluating their progress.
We set well-being milestones with individuals and monitor their progress towards them. Across all our activities we monitor numbers such as referrals onto different recovery pathways, calls to our helpline, and attendance at workshops. We also collect personal testimonies, videos where appropriate, and case studies. The stories of the people we support are central to helping others into recovery, so we encourage people to share their experiences on our website, social media, podcasts, and blog posts.