Closing education and communication gaps to sustain recovery.
Join us! Share your time, resources, skills, passion and experiences to help develop creative solutions to
​engage your community in these important efforts!
Recovery Management 
Friends MATTer is creating a pilot program to assist people with maintaining healthy behaviors after discharge from short-term residential treatment for opioid use disorder. Program participants will engage in an assessment of recovery strengths and anticipated barriers (i.e. housing, employment, legal, educational, financial, relationship, social life) that will serve as the foundation for a recovery plan with specific goals and action steps. Friends MATTer will then mobilize community resources provide and assertively link individuals and their network with:
  • peer-based recovery allies
  • recovery mutual aid groups and existing support services
  • financial, educational, housing and/or employment resources
  • opportunities to create and participate in positive social activities
  • tools and strategies to strengthen communication lines among their network
  • education (i.e. addiction treatment, recovery, motivational strategies)
  • check-ins to encourage adherence to recovery and professional treatment plans
Currently, Friends MATTer is bringing together members of the recovery community, treatment professionals, researchers and other allies
to shape this program.
We plan to run a small-scale pilot with built-in process and outcome evaluation measures. Our intention is to take lessons learned to refine and scale the program up to serve more individuals with sustaining the critical first five years of recovery. 
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Sober Social Events and Activities
Friends MATTer believes that our community can be more recovery-friendly. We are focusing on increasing access to sober social events and activities as part of this movement. Friends MATTer is partnering with local businesses, like-minded organizations and individuals to achieve this aim. Our goal is to build awareness of the strength of our recovery community, reduce addiction-related stigma, and help people to create life-long healthy and supportive relationships, habits, and hobbies.
 
Mobile Technology to Sustain Recovery 
The MATT APP
Friends MATTer is committed to strengthening the communication of the support network for recovering persons in their transition to a healthy and balanced lifestyle. Often times, those in the support network are not aware of one another, with no interactive dialog. We are interested in developing a smart phone “app” that will both complement our recovery management programming and serve as a stand-alone method to promote this needed dialogue and save lives.
Key features for the app are:
  • Real time, 24/7, secure dialogue between ALL persons in the support network; optimizing communication for immediate and effective support.
  • Key check points of critical relapse-prone times, enabling the network to be available when they are most needed.
  • Ability to report a relapse situation anonymously to the entire network alerting to the need for immediate intervention; removing the "fear factor" associated with being the first to report issues of concern with loved one.