With its innovative Consumer Council and Peer Specialist programs, NET has earned an international reputation as a leader of the Recovery Movement. These programs offer a network of support to help people along the road to recovery.

Since 2000, NET has selected and trained Persons in Recovery (PIR) for positions ranging from Recovery Aids to Peer Specialists. These people serve as a bridge between NET consumers and professional service providers and are integral to NET’s programs and success.

In 2006, NET launched its Consumer Council to give persons in recovery a voice in their own treatment and in the direction of the agency. Each of NET’s 28 therapy groups elects one or two representatives; the Council’s two subcommittees – Treatment and Community Reintegration – focus on life inside and outside of NET.

Consumer Council members, PIR volunteers, and Peer Specialists also operate and maintain the NETWorks Recovery Support Center. They coordinate and manage programming (from anger management workshops to computer literacy training) and social and recreational events (from community clean up projects to sober dance and karaoke nights).

The goal of these initiatives is to create communities of mutual support that reinforce sobriety and mitigate relapse. At the 2010 Recovery Walk, NET’s community was vocal and visible. A record-breaking 11,000 people took part, making it the largest walk ever assembled in support of recovery, and NET had the largest team of any agency. Walkers proudly wore NET T-shirts and carried signs reading “We Celebrate Recovery Here” and “Long-term Recovery is Real.”

NET’s success and its role at the forefront of the Recovery Movement has been acknowledged over and over:

• Addiction experts from Tokyo, Japan and Great Britain and from across the United States have visited NET to learn about its recovery transformation approach and to gather innovative ideas to take back to their agencies.
• When White House Drug Czar Gil Kerlikowske, director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, visited Philadelphia to seek ways to curb drug abuse, he invited NorthEast Treatment Centers to attend the meeting and share its approach.
• In a front-page Philadelphia Inquirer article (Sept. 24, 2010) about Philadelphia’s role in the recovery movement, reporter Don Sapatkin lauded NET’s initiative in starting its Consumer Council and for “making changes even before the city asked.”
• CARF, the Commission on Accreditation of Rehabilitation Facilities, has awarded NET two international commendations for creative programming, specifically for the integration of peer-based services with treatment.
• NET graduates have set up most of the Recovery Houses in Philadelphia.

For more information about NET’s Pennsylvania Adult Behavioral Health Services, click here.

For more information about NET’s Delaware Adult Behavioral Health Services, click here.