Healing a Village: A Practical Guide to Building Recovery Ready Communities

Offers a hopeful, practical blueprint for building community-based recovery systems to combat addiction and save lives.

This book is about hope. Over 107,000 fellow Americans died in 2023 from drug overdoses and another 178,000 died from excessive alcohol use. Lethal illicit drugs such as fentanyl, methamphetamine, and xylazine are showing up on our streets and poisoning our fellow citizens, including those who may not even intend to use these toxic synthetic drugs.

Healing a Village details a plan to build recovery capacity within a community to remove barriers and improve access to service for individuals and families seeking help from addiction. The author provides real-life examples of successful community coalitions that have delivered positive outcomes for their communities--from prevention, to harm reduction, to treatment, to recovery support. Lefebvre, the author, shares from his own experiences, "When I exited our local hospital following a 4-day detox, there were no treatment and recovery resources within my community. I was forced to travel to the west coast for treatment. That is no longer the case in my community today." A case study of the Greater Portsmouth (NH) Recovery Coalition provides a deep dive on each of the elements of a Recovery Ready Community. The author uses personal struggles and successes in building recovery coalitions to validate the book's thesis of hope.