Woman’s Voice: This special program is brought to you by the Lenawee Substance Abuse Prevention Coalition. Guests provide information about upcoming events, resources available, and the many ways to help reduce substance use and promote a healthy Lenawee.
Kathy Williams: This is Kathy Williams and with me on tonight’s program is Lacey Jung and Ben Trevino. And we’re going to be talking about a program that just launched. Its acronyms are FAN. But it stands for Families Against Narcotics. Lacey, tell us a little bit about what the program’s all about.
Lacey Jung: So Families Against Narcotics, or FAN, is a Michigan wide organization that provides alternative solutions to individuals who are impacted by substance use and provides resources to families who are also impacted by substance abuse. We’re going to go over a couple of our programs. One being our launch program, Hope Not Handcuffs, and we’ll tell you a little bit about what these programs can offer to our community.
Kathy Williams: So Ben, it sounds like a very intriguing program. A lot of people are looking for extra help, not only for their selves, but for their families. It, the whole community is, is impacted by drug abuse. Can you tell us about some of the programs available then?
Ben Trevino: Right. Yeah. So there are a lot of people in the community that are impacted by substance abuse, and we’re trying to give a different approach to the war on drugs that we’ve been fighting for 50 something years now, and offering alternative solutions and right now we’re probably not going to see any headway as far as changing statutes and laws at the state or federal level. So we can change things at the community level. And so, like Lacey said, our launch program is Hope Not Handcuffs, and it’s simply offering people a place to get help. Any participating law enforcement office like APD or the Lenawee County Sheriff’s Office, somebody can go to the police and they can get help, no questions asked. You’re not going to get run for a background check. They’re not going to search for warrants. They’re not going to interrogate you. They’re just going to simply connect you with somebody that can get you help that you’re looking for. Connect with resources or treatment services and the people that help facilitate those services are called angels.
Kathy Williams: Okay.
Ben Trevino: And anyone can be an angel. Anybody that has an interest in it, you don’t need any credentials, you don’t need any sort of background. If you want to help, you can help. And we will give out the phone number and email at the end if you want to reach out for that. And so we’re, we already have our first angel, actually somebody that participates in the local recovery community and she’s excited to be a part of it.
Kathy Williams: Lacey, one of the other programs then is Navigate?
Lacey Jung: Yeah. So Navigate is a program we can launch within our community that helps connect people in recovery with a coach. It can connect families to a peer who can give them resources and be there to assist them in their recovery.
Ben Trevino: Right, so there’s two different types of coaches. There’s the recovery coach, which is somebody that is in active recovery, used to be in active addiction, and has been abstaining for at least two years from their drug of choice. And then we have peer family coaches, which are people that are typically impacted by a family member that went through active addiction or is no longer with us, and they sort of have that boots on the ground firsthand experience with, you know, being a family member impacted by addiction. So that’s the two separate types of peers that we’re going to have working with us. And, and if anybody’s interested in that, once again, at the end, we’re going to give out the details on how to connect us.
Kathy Williams: So it’s all about perspective. Everyone has a different perspective of how they’ve been affected, how they’ve been impacted, and this Families Against Narcotics is trying to pull all that information together then to assist someone, or even as a coach, it would be beneficial to the person as a coach to give back.
Ben Trevino: Yeah, it really is. Everyone finds a lot of… it’s a rewarding experience to be a recovery coach. I’m personally a recovery coach and although it’s difficult and a lot of times the outcomes are pretty dismal, the wins that you do have are really impactful. And, it’s, it’s quite the experience to help somebody get out of their active addiction.
Kathy Williams: So there’s lots of ways then that our listeners can find out more about being a part of FAN, Families Against Narcotics. Lacey, what are some of the ways they can connect?
Lacey Jung: So we hold our FAN Forum meetings every fourth Tuesday of every month at 7:00 PM. The public is welcome to join our Forum. It’s held at the Adrian Public Library in the basement.
Kathy Williams: Okay.
Lacey Jung: We invite anyone who is interested in learning more information or being a part of helping these programs launch to come out and see us at the library.
Kathy Williams: And Ben, is there some other ways they can find out more information then?
Ben Trevino: Yes, so the official Lenawee FAN phone number is (517) 939-9879. You can also contact us by email. You can text that number also. You can contact us by email at Lenawee@FamiliesAgainstNarcotics.org, or you can go to the FamiliesAgainstNarcotics.org website and on the dropdown menu for locations, you can choose “Lenawee”. That’ll have all our information up there. And, yeah, like, like Lacey said, we are meeting the fourth Tuesday of every month. The very first launch is going to be this coming Tuesday, the 23rd at 7:00 PM. If you are in active addiction, if you are in active recovery, if you know somebody in recovery, if you’ve been impacted by somebody, if you are… have strong opinions about this or ideas, I think you should be there. You should really represent your perspective on the community. And that means everyone within the sound of my voice is going to be there at the library in the basement.
Kathy Williams: There you go.
Ben Trevino: Yes. Tuesday. And I’ve only told you about a few of the programs. If you want to have some input on what programs we’re launching next, apart from Hope Not Handcuffs, there is a survey on the website that you can take that we’re collecting data from the community to see what’s most important to you.
Kathy Williams: Well, Lacey and Ben, you’re wonderful ambassadors for the FAN program and we appreciate you sharing the information with our listeners.
Ben Trevino: Yeah, thank you for having me.
Lacey Jung: Thank you. Thank you for having us.
Woman’s Voice: The Lenawee Substance Abuse Prevention Coalition supported by funding from the Health Resources and Services Administration. Thank you for listening. New messages air on the second and fourth Monday each month at 6:15 PM. You can listen to this program as a podcast under the “on air audio” tab on WLEN.com and get more information at DrugPreventionLenawee.com.
