Special Board of Aldermen 06-08-2021 Page 2
As mentioned, |am a CRSW and Recovery Advisor an advwcate for the Governor’s Recovery Friendly Workplace
Initiative and as such, | am the advisory assigned to the City of Nashua for the recovery friendly activities that we will
reference tonight.
One of the things that | like to lead off with is a definition by the American Society of Addiction Medicine of Substance
Use Disorder because that’s really going to frame our discussion and it really will help us to think about substance use
disorder in the way that we typically reference it as we move through the short presentation. So according to the
American Society of Addition Medicine: “Addiction is a treatable, chronic medical disease involving complex interactions
among brain circuits, genetics, the envronment, and an individual’s life experiences. People with addiction use
substances or engage in behaviors that become compulsive and often continue despite harmful consequences.”
| think it’s important to point out in this section that, “Prevention efforts and treatment approaches for addiction are
generally as successful as those for other chronic diseases.” As we begin to think about substance use disorder as a
disease and like any other disease, we would hope for parody in terms of policies in the workplace that would support
substance use disorder just like any other disease like heart disease or diabetes.
For those who may not know or be familiar with the initiative, I'll give you a brief overvew. The Initiative was launched in
March of 2018 by Governor Sununu and the foundation of the Initiative is to promote health, safety, and wellness for all
New Hampshire work places and employees. In our work, we always empower work places to provide support for
employees in recovery as well as those impacted by substance use disorders. What | mean by that is you may have
employees that are working for you currently who have a family member or a loved one that is impacted by substance
use disorder and we have a way to provide resources to that employee and to you as the employer to help support that
employee should they have that situation. Our Initiative always challenges stigma and in fact we have a whole training
on safe language that helps to challenge stigma and really is part of beginning to change the culture in the workplaces
that we work with. Last but not least, everything that we do does encourage employee retention and you're starting to
see those outcomes as well as employee motivation and productivity.
Just some quick accomplishments to share with you. Currently we have just over actually 280 workplaces participating
in Recovery Friendly Workplace Initiative representing over 70,000 employees and the City of Nashua tonight is joining
those workplaces here. People have engaged in a recovery friendly workplace activities nearly 15,000 times since its
inception and we have not only outreached to 15 States but now 23 States who have also reached to us and we're in the
process of sharing best practices and there are States that are very interested in replicating our model as some already
have such as Rhode Island. We built out over 10 trainings, especially when we became remote during COVID times. To
date, we have over 170 businesses trained by our Recovery Friendly Workplace advisors and some of the virtual
trainings that we offer.
So we’re often asked well how do we support Recovery Friendly Workplaces and | want to share that we always try to
deliver a customized approach so different size organizations, municipalities, towns, business, organizations, all different
sizes, all stages of readiness, and all different cultures. So what we always want to hear first from folks is what are your
needs, and what is your culture like, and where are you in terms of readiness to develop a recovery friendly culture. As
advisors, we also connect you to statewide and local resources and certainly | know you're probably all familiar with your
local resources but we often have a request to communicate and connect to statewide resources that could be beneficial
to the city as well. One ofthe ways we’ve already done that is I’m the advisory for the City of Manchester as well and
we've already exchanged some information back and forth with the City of Nashua to help drive what we’re going to do
over the next year and beyond.
We always have tools, materials and templates that we provide for each workplace so we make it as easy as possible for
you to create something that you might want to share with your employees. As | already mentioned, we have no cost
trainings and do support employees and their loved ones as well. We also will connect recovery friendly champions to
chair policy resources and samples. Everyone has policies — I’m sure the city has policies and so forth but it may be that
you want to review those and we can easily connect you with others who have amended, or upgraded, or changed their
policies in a way to support recovery.
We're all about peer connections. Any time we can make connections peer to peer, we find that peer to peer
connections are important often if somebody has a wait time or they can’t do the proper level of treatment. This would
come through your recovery community organizations or sometimes employees are trained as recovery coaches and
even CRSWs that provide internal support and augment an EAP program, an HR, and other efforts like a wellness
committee that you might have.
