About GRN

Our Goals 

  • Support recovery training, knowledge expansion, and mentoring 
  • Promote research-based recovery messaging  
  • Eliminate discrimination and stigma against those in recovery  
  • Empower recovery advocates to stimulate professional growth 

Our Objectives

  • Lead Global Recovery Dialogues 
  • Create and maintain a website for Global Communication 
  • Host Global Recovery Conferences and Symposiums 
  • Promote the expansion of a trained recovery workforce 
Spacer Design For Heading (Short)

The GRN subscribes to the following definition of recovery: 

Recovery from alcohol and other substance use disorders is an active voluntary process and a health outcome. Recovery is an individual’s continual growth that most often involves support networks, and that builds recovery capital to address the biological, psychological, social, and spiritual disturbances that characterize substance use disorders. Recovery is an ongoing process of growth to achieve the outcome of a substance-free life which allows an individual to reach their full potential. 

Recovery includes, but is not limited to, the following factors: 

  1. The aim of improved quality of life and enhanced overall wellness as identified by the individual, including freedom from other compulsive behaviors/addictions/dependencies; 

  2. An individual’s consistent pursuit of abstinence from the substances or behaviors towards which pathological pursuit had been previously directed, or which could pose a risk for pathological pursuit in the future; 

  3. Relief of an individual’s symptoms including substance craving; 

  4. Improvement of an individual’s own behavioral control, emotional self-regulation, and freedom from external dependencies; 

  5. Enrichment of an individual’s relationship with self and others, interpersonal skills, social connectedness, sense of purpose, belonging, and citizenship; 

  6. Access to recovery resources that are appropriate to the individual’s culture, language, and gender; 

  7. Acknowledging there are multiple pathways to recovery, including the use of medications to treat substance use and other co-occurring disorders; 

Recovery as an outcome occurs if both remission from alcohol and other substance use disorders are achieved and maintained over time 

*Recovery capital includes all the strengths and resources that people bring to the recovery process; it is made up of all the assets, both material and non-material, that can help an individual start and stay in recovery. Building recovery capital is a dynamic process; it takes practice and usually includes mentoring and other forms of support from others. 

Recovery capital takes many forms and can be personal, family/social, or communal in nature. Examples of “community recovery capital” are laws and policies that support recovery as well as economic conditions and opportunities that facilitate the pursuit and maintenance of recovery within the community.  Recovery capital can be internal, such as a person’s individual qualities, or it can be external, such as a person’s financial resources, practical skills, different kinds of intelligence, the ability to learn from one's own mistakes, the ability to forgive oneself or others, and the capacity to embrace a sense of humor! 

** This definition borrows heavily from already established definitions of recovery, including SAMHSA and ASAM.