The Center for Community Alternatives (CCA) is the facilitating organization for the Recovery Network of New York (RNNY), a peer-led recovery community that will serve recovering people leaving the criminal justice system in the Rochester and Albany area. Participants will include people in recovery from the African American and Latino communities as well as growing numbers of women. Services offered by the RNNY will also take into account gender, age, linguistic, and sexual orientation.

Peer leaders in Rochester and Albany, in concert with the existing program in Syracuse, a former SAMHSA/CSAT funded initiative, will develop peer recovery support services in these cities to form a broad network that will serve Upstate New York. The aim of these community-based programs is to address the long-term social and practical needs of people leaving the criminal justice system - parolees, drug court participants, and participants in alternative-to-incarceration programs - who intend to take up healthy and responsible lives and to address the double stigma associated with addiction and possession of a criminal record. This is a pioneering project for Upstate New York.

CCA will serve to support the work of peer leaders at each site as they begin to design, implement, and manage programs; administer GPRA; and conduct program evaluation. The Rochester and Albany communities are currently in the final phases of a strengths and needs assessment, but examples of peer delivered services are likely to include: civic restoration, employment services, social support services, leadership training, peer-delivered HIV prevention education, mentoring, and housing assistance. Leadership training and community outreach will be a major emphasis in year one to ensure that a sound foundation is built in establishing recovery community support services outside the Syracuse area in the subsequent grant years.