Substance abuse appears in many forms and affects an incredibly wide diversity of people. The journey to recovery is also a journey of many roads, and Voices of Hope Maryland travels all of them, from its Cecil Recovery Center in Elkton to its Harford Recovery Center in Aberdeen. Cecil County Life recently spoke with Program Advocate Christopher Rives, General Programs Manager Aaron Wright and Chief Operations Officer Erin Wright to talk about the assistance they and their peers provide to those in need.

Cecil County Life: When did Voices of Hope Maryland begin?

Erin: We were founded in 2013, and our roots really began in Cecil County. Several people in recovery began to come together for weekly meetings, just to talk about change and what we wanted to do. For the first few years, we were just getting together to talk about the ways we could eventually implement change. We received our first grant in 2018, which enabled several of us to become the agency’s first employees, and by December of that year, our programs first began to build.

The relationship with each person who walks through the Cecil Recovery Center’s doors on Howard Street in Elkton for the first time begins with a conversation. Take me through the training your certified peer specialists undergo that gives them the skills to design pathways of recovery for others.

Erin: Voices of Hope is one of the leading organizations in Maryland that provides assistance for people with lived experience to go through all of the training and necessary requirements to become a certified peer recovery specialist. To obtain that credential, someone must have at least two years in sustained recovery, have 46 hours of peer work training that includes 30 hours of core training known as the Recovery Coach Academy. The Academy touches on everything a future peer will need to know to be able to use their lived experience like motivational interviewing, active listening, ethics and scenarios -- and how to use their story in an impactful way.

After the Academy, they will need to take 16 hours of ethics classes that present various scenarios and a lot of ‘what-ifs’ that often arise during peer training. Once they receive the training, they will then need to compile 500 hours in the role of a peer, working under a registered peer supervisor, who will then need to sign a letter of recommendation.

Aaron: Our peers here are scattered into the wide spectrum of what we provide here, and they’re not done with their education once they acquire their certification. We still have mandatory training at least twice a month because policies and procedures are always evolving. It’s like our Executive Director Jennifer Tuerke, whose message has been and will continue to be, “Learn, learn, learn.”

What first introduced you to Voices of Hope Maryland? Tell us your stories.

Aaron: I was a heroin addict for 23 years, that included seven years in federal prison and two stays in mental hospitals. I could not find long-term recovery in my native Philadelphia, so I pursued recovery in Cecil County because my mother has been living in Rising Sun. I thought to myself, “Where is my worth? What is my value and what is my meaning in this world?” I began to attend Voices of Hope Maryland support meetings at the Cecil County Health Department and there, I met other people in recovery and soon, we began to ask each other, “What does Cecil County need? How can we help others in our community?” We all were waiting for someone to come in and save the day when we were already making some progress on our own. I later became a volunteer and began to spread the word and eventually it gathered more people and that led to the start of Voices of Hope Maryland. That is where I began to find my worth by helping my community not go through what I went through.

Erin: I was born and raised in Cecil County and while I was a grade A student, I was also in the depths of my addiction. I caught felony charges. I was involved in the judicial system and in and out of the hospital with severe wounds, and at the end I overdosed in my car at a local park with my one-year-old daughter in the backseat with me at the time. Luckily, someone saw me and called 9-1-1 and a policeman saved my life. That’s where my story started. I ended up going to a Mommy-and-Me recovery center, and in 2016, I heard about Voices of Hope Maryland who were meeting at the Health Department every Wednesday.

Two weeks into my recovery, I started to show up on Wednesdays and we all began to talk about our experiences and what we wanted to do. At the time, we didn’t have anything tangible to show those who asked us who we were, so we would have our table at events and simply respond, “We are people in recovery and we’re here to help.” In December of 2018 -- when we received our first capacity building grant for $350,000 -- Aaron, our executive director and I became the first employees hired at Voices of Hope Maryland. Last year, our budget was $3.1 million, so in a very short, five-and-a-half-year period, we have slowly been building every stone of this organization, from the very first backpacks we put on.

Christopher: I am one of only two employees at Voices of Hope Maryland who is not actively in recovery. When my daughter Caitlin Renee first started using 14 years ago, I had no clue as to who to turn to for help. There were no resources. While my then-wife took the tough love route, I tried to get Caitlin jobs. I bought her cars. I gave her everything but money. She wasn’t actively addicted for more than two years before she overdosed and passed away on April 2, 2012.

I first met Jennifer Tuerke at a networking event in January of 2023, and I began to tell her the story of my daughter. I have now been with Voices of Hope Maryland for about a year, and I was on the organization’s board of directors for 4 months prior to being employed with VOH. If there would have been an organization like Voices of Hope around when my daughter was alive, she might still be alive. Voices of Hope works so well because a person in recovery is talking to a person who wants to get into recovery, and they understand each other.

Addiction does not discriminate. It cannot decipher race, religion, ethnicity, orientation or demographics and it defies the worn-out depiction of the addict as a strung-out, homeless person wandering back alleys. Let’s tear down those stigmas by asking you to provide a broad profile of the diversity of people who seek assistance from Voices of Hope Maryland.

Erin: We have a very large diversity of people who use our services -- everyone from the most successful college student who suffers from an overdose to the businessperson who drinks too much -- and everywhere in between. What is unique about Voices of Hope Maryland is that our services are geared for everyone at every level of abuse, whether they are actively using or in recovery. It ranges from our peers putting on backpacks and visiting our most devastating neighborhoods in Harford and Cecil County to the person who is 15 years in recovery and needs to attend a support meeting.

Aaron: Through the trust we have with our community partnerships, family members are coming to us and asking, “How can I speak to my child? How do I remove myself from being an enabler? Is there support for parents?” Substance abuse doesn’t just directly affect the person using drugs. It affects everybody, and our vision is that everyone affected by substance abuse finds hope and healing in a supportive community.

Certain stereotypical and entrenched beliefs still place those affected by addiction into unfair categories, which often convince those in recovery to define themselves by these classifications. How does Voices of Hope Maryland begin to help those in recovery rewrite the narratives of their self-perception?

Aaron: It is very hard for an individual who is in recovery to let go of a lot of shame, guilt and resentment and too often, they let their past define them who they are currently. When the idea of Voice of Hope Maryland was first launched, we just knew that we were all tired of going to more funerals than weddings, baby showers and birthday parties combined, so in order to galvanize our voices, we needed to step up into these roles to build data collection systems and apply for grants, and what we became in the process were mentors in the aspect of not letting addiction and recovery define any of us. By us doing that, we were attracting others in recovery, and it has become an organization that now has operations in two counties that employs more than 50 people in recovery. By us pushing ourselves, we were actually pulling others with us. People in recovery always feel “less than,” but when they tell their stories in public, they begin to take the power back and not give that power to others and begin to see themselves as equal.

Erin: It starts with us. We are very open about our stories, and we encourage others to share their story. Before the peer profession took off, it was the anonymous world of recovery that wasn’t talked about. With our peer counseling initiative, we are now seeing others come out of the shadows and say, “I am not anonymous.”

In my role as the chief operations officer of a multi-million-dollar organization, I am sometimes still reluctant to speak with our lawmakers, because I am afraid to tell them who I once was. Then I think, “This is who I am. I am going to share my story so they can see that people can change and that recovery is possible.” Addiction is not a moral deficiency. It is a disease. I did those things. That’s who I was in my disease, but it’s not who I am today. Reducing stigmas begins with all of us speaking up.

The name of this organization is Voices of Hope Maryland. Please give me an example of hope that you have seen, in terms of an individual’s recovery.

Erin: There are too many stories of hope to share because they are all my favorite stories. Fifty percent of our employees were first introduced to our organization on an outreach program. We helped treat their wounds, and one day, they found the hope and the will to want to change. With that, they decide to go to treatment and it’s us whom they trust to speak with. We tell them to come back to us when they finish treatment. We help them get into a recovery house, help them find a job and work on their resumes, and then encourage them to volunteer with us, and they often do, because they want to give back to the organization that helped save their life.

There are so many of these stories, and they are all unique in their own way.

The Voices of Hope Maryland Cecil County Recovery Center is located at 411 West Pulaski Highway, Elkton, Md. The Voices of Hope Maryland Harford Recovery Center is located at 7 Aberdeen Shopping Center, Aberdeen, Md.

To learn more, visit www.voicesofhopemaryland.org.