The Multicultural Wellbriety Peer Recovery Support Program: Two Decades of Community-Based Recovery

Abstract

White Bison has been effective in training 388 peer recovery support persons, known as Firestarters, to implement standardized, Native-focused, peer recovery programs based on the traditional knowledge of tribal elders. Following the elders' Four Laws of Change, White Bison has demonstrated the program capacity to build indigenous support communities of Wellbriety, which are facilitated by these healthy and sober spiritual leaders. Using the Native paradigm of evidence-based model programs, effectiveness has been measured and validated through success at generating this human capital of civic leadership. In turn, using a clan model of Wellbriety, community coalitions have begun to emerge to sustain the work of the Firestarters through local Healing Forests that correct for multigenerational family problems that have grown up in the wake of high rates of addiction.