From the LifeRing Service Center activity log:

Wednesday May 31. Marjorie J and I drive from Oakland south to Hayward in rush hour traffic -- the freeway is a parking lot -- to join in a 6:30 pm support groups presentation to new patients at the Kaiser Chemical Dependency Recovery Program (CDRP) in Union City / Hayward. Normally a 20-minute cruise, this took over an hour. But we got there just in time. A bearded AA speaker was just finishing up with his story. Marj took the floor and told her story and outlined the basics of LifeRing and how it works. Marj opened with emotionally compelling incidents from her life and had the crowd eating out of her hand when she got to the philosophy.  It helped a great deal that about two thirds of the audience raised their hands when she asked whether they had ever been to a LifeRing meeting before. LouAnthony G., who started the LifeRing meeting there in March, has found a strong response; he told us that he had 23 people at his meeting the day before.

After it was over, we chatted briefly with the bearded AA speaker outside, and he told us he was an atheist and probably would have joined LifeRing had it been active in the area when he got sober. He said he would check us out.

I dropped Marj off at her home and drove to Merritt Peralta Institute in Oakland (the 28-day inpatient program) for the regular Wednesday night LifeRing meeting I do there. We have had a consistently solid turnout there for months now; if we don't have the whole census we get at least a third to a half. The counselor on duty told me that the AA meetings onsite had been sparsely attended of late. In the past this counselor has been cool to icy toward LifeRing but this time he was cordial and set up the copy machine for me to make extra copies of our meeting schedule.

The next evening, Thursday, I drop in on Lori A's LifeRing meeting at Kaiser Oakland. She has 22 people sardined into a room built for 12. She will be moving to a bigger room next week.

Tuesday night June 4 I drove back down to Hayward/Union City to see for myself how LouAnthony's meeting was going. Sure enough, exactly 23 people there again, squeezed into a room built for 15. Still, LouAnthony managed to run a very productive meeting. He has asked for, and got, a bigger room for the following week, and gets to keep this one as well, so that he can split the meeting if the numbers continue like this.

Note: we need to have another convenor workshop soon!

Next day I found out that the Kaiser CDRP in Oakland was expecting LifeRing speakers the previous night while I was in Hayward. Somehow that date never got on my calendar. I called the staff facilitator and apologized and wrote a letter of apology to follow up. This is the second time in the seven years we have been doing those presentations in Oakland that I blew it. I now have the dates firmly calendared for the rest of the year.

Wednesday morning June 5 I attended a free workshop organized by a County-funded agency to train substance abuse and mental health treatment providers in integrating nicotine cessation into their programs. A lot of the big facilities in the county have already gone that route, including of course Kaiser, and it looked from this capacity crowd that the rest were following. I met (and gave LifeRing meeting schedules) to a number of providers, including the medical director of the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic, the nicotine cessation counselor from Kaiser San Francisco, and others. I chatted with as many as I could. This was a pretty friendly group, not at all a heavy 12-step crowd. A lot of doctors and counselors in nicotine cessation see AA / NA as part of the problem, not part of the solution. Lots of natural allies here. I'm posting a more detailed report with copies of much of the program binder on unhooked.com, in a new section of discussion topics called "Cutting Edge," shortly.

Thursday morning June 6, Bill Somers and I drove up to Vacaville (literally "cow town"), about 55 miles north of Oakland, to give a LifeRing presentation to the staff at the Kaiser CDRP there. Bill has recently moved to Vacaville and he contacted the facility to set up the appointment, with the objective to start a meeting there. The unit director, a young woman with a very competent and friendly manner, welcomed us and led us into the staff meeting room. There we found to our surprise a copy of the 12 steps on the wall (one of those roll-up shade posters) and a copy of the serenity prayer on the only easel. Obviously we were a long way from the Kaiser facilities in Oakland and San Francisco. Because the group was small, we went into dialogue format and did not push hard on giving the set-piece "3S" presentation. All went fairly well until one of the staffers said that their patients, in order to get into Phase III of their chemical dependency recovery program, had to be working the steps with a sponsor, and was LifeRing going to provide that? This is the first time we heard anything like that from a Kaiser facility. We did the best we could with it. We'll see how it comes out. Bill is on vacation this week and he will announce what the director's verdict is when he gets back and checks his phone messages.

Tuesday this week the Service Center phone machine had a message from another Kaiser CDRP director, this one in Redwood City. Redwood City is on the peninsula south of San Francisco and is part of Silicon Valley. This director had heard the LifeRing presentation last year at the Kaiser CD Chief's meeting, and got a copy of the workbook there, and had been thinking and thinking about it and now had made up her mind she wanted a LifeRing meeting at the facility. We arranged for me to come down next Tuesday June 18 to give a talk. Gillian E from San Francisco and possibly Betts from Pacifica and maybe Sally L from Half Moon Bay and maybe even Lin L (sockermom) who lives real nearby to that facility will be joining the speaker team for the occasion. This one is going to be an interesting challenge: we're going to try to get a meeting going without already having a convenor in place. If there is strong interest among the patients it just might work. Otherwise we may have to come back every few weeks and repeat until a core group crystallizes. I'll keep the list posted what happens.

Tues eve I drop in on Meg H's meeting at Kaiser Oakland, and she complains that the LifeRing stamp, that all the convenors there use to stamp people's attendance slips, has run out of ink and is so faded you can hardly see it anymore. I take it with me, re-ink it at the Service Center, and bring it back to John's Wednesday night meeting just in time. I'm thinking, wow! We stamped so many people's attendance slips that we ran a brand new self-inking stamp dry. It's such a little thing, but it says a lot.

And the beat goes on. The Service Center phone machine today had a message from a counselor at a San Francisco recovery house, Baker Place on Grove Street, wanting LifeRing literature and contemplating a meeting there. This is part of the same chain as Acceptance Place, where Syl S and I did an initial presentation a few months ago, and where Mark C now convenes an internal (closed) LifeRing meeting for the residents.

My guess is that the word-of-mouth in the treatment professional community has gotten stronger and more positive about us since our Congress in March. Those of you who were there will recall that Marylou B. engineered it for us to become providers of Continuing Education Credits, and that must have made an impression on the providers -- not to mention, of course, the outstanding quality of the presentations all around, and the good work everyone is doing in the existing meetings. That's why the phone is ringing and the demand for meetings is challenging our ability to provide convenors to lead them. A good problem to have.

Stay tuned,

-- Marty N.