Members of the recovery community use their direct experiences to identify the problems and needs in recovery and find ways to address them.

RCSP projects are “unearthing” recovery knowledge by exploring and sharing what they know, individually and collectively, about addiction and recovery that they have learned from experience. As they have worked across multiple task areas—mobilizing, building an organization, developing leaders, building relationships and linkages, developing peer services—they have been laying the groundwork for liberating, and then sustaining, the “authentic” voices of individuals and families with first-hand knowledge of, and unique perspectives on, what it means to be addicted, and what it means to recover.

To ensure the authenticity of peer recovery support services, RCSP grant projects have conducted needs assessments to identify the particular needs of their communities and the strengths of their members that can be directed toward filling those needs. They want the peer services to be authentically defined by people who have experienced recovery.