Healing Transitions’ Recovery Outreach Department, incepted in 2018, made 8,308 outreach attempts in 2023. Recognizing the challenge of maintaining and tracking such a significant volume of calls and data, Recovery Outreach Specialist Trish Wuchte, who has been instrumental in enhancing the program, developed an innovative phone tree system.
This initiative connects individuals in sustained recovery with those currently navigating their recovery journeys, ensuring that everyone receives consistent support and follow-up from someone who has successfully walked the path before.
Trish, a former program participant, had built numerous connections with fellow participants and alumni. However, upon leaving Healing Transitions, she realized that many of these valuable relationships were lost. Understanding that recovery thrives on community support and the importance of maintaining connections, Trish reflects, “We allow ourselves to be vulnerable when we are comfortable with someone, and recovery requires a lot of vulnerability. Seeking help demands vulnerability, and it’s much easier to do that with someone you’ve shared experiences with, like those from our program.”
Trish knew that individuals still finding their way to recovery might respond better to someone with similar experiences or someone they know.
“Reconnecting with someone familiar versus a stranger is more natural, effective, and likely because of the pre-established trust, and ultimately a much better way,” she shares.
When sharing an example of a connection forged through the phone tree innovation, Trish recalls a time when she was able to connect with a former participant who was struggling to fit in at Healing Transitions. Trish remembers asking, “If there was one person from the program you could talk to, who would it be?”
The participant named the person who had an impact, and Trish reached out to the alumnus, who also remembered the individual. They reconnected over the phone.
“While this isn’t a traditional success story—since the former participant is still drinking—it’s significant in their recovery journey because they were able to speak with someone who treated them kindly during the program,” Trish explains. “That sense of familiarity is crucial, and they can now connect that to their recovery.”
This exemplifies the core purpose of the phone tree: to grow recovery networks and link people with others who are successful in their recovery. Even if someone isn’t ready to stop yet, they now have a new contact to call when they’re ready to seek help or when they need encouragement.
Managing contact information for multiple people in recovery is a lot. Trish gathers data from program discharges, logs it into our cloud-based, bespoke outreach database—developed by the software company Five CRM—and creates status indicators that denote the intensity of outreach someone needs. This allows her to determine the frequency of outreach.
The goal of our Recovery Outreach Specialists is to proactively reach out to those who are still struggling, without delay. To achieve this, they envision building a list of volunteers who are willing to be contacted for outreach efforts.
“This doesn’t just help those who are struggling; it also helps Healing Transitions expand our reach,” Trish explains.
Being a Recovery Outreach Specialist is about finding the next person who can benefit from your experience. As Trish puts it, “The work we do can be summed up in just one sentence from the Big Book. On page 100, it says, ‘Both you and the new man must walk day by day in the path of spiritual progress.”
The Phone Tree is all about connection. It ensures that we, as an organization, stay connected with those who have come through our doors and that we, as people in recovery, remain connected to others who are still on their journey to recovery.