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Recovery Walked!

Published September 25, 2008

Recovery walked Sunday, September 21, 2008 during our 7th annual Recovery Walks! event at Memorial Hall in Philadelphia. Recovery Walks! is a dramatic fundraising event designed to display, celebrate, and support recovery. The event is Southeastern Pennsylvania’s largest walk for recovery from alcohol and other drug addictions.

This year’s event attracted 4,477 walkers! This giant group of participants, demonstrating their pride, hope, and enormous energy, proved undeniably that recovery is real!

Present at the event were recovery service providers and a prestigious line up of speakers and special guests. We saw the admiration participants had for these leaders. Recovery Walks! 2008 gave hope to those in recovery that there are people and organizations—PRO-ACT and others—that support the recovery community. The walk helped change the stigma associated with people in recovery. It also inspired those not in recovery to respect and support those who are. Perhaps most of all, we hope the event inspired someone who was still using on Sunday to walk over to a provider table and make the decision to join the recovery community.

Photos

Visit our online photo gallery, hosted by Flickr, to see hundreds of images from the event. Thank you to Thomas McGrath Jr. of Loren Communications, Philadelphia and Kate Lawton-Akers for capturing these images.

Speakers and Special Guests

Recovery Walks! began on stage with our speakers and special guests. Those on stage included:

Honor Guard Led the Walk

Following our speakers, the Honor Guard—those with 10 or more years of recovery—led the walk. The Honor Guard wore purple sashes indicating the number of years they’ve been in recovery. This year’s Honor Guard was composed of 154 individuals with a total of 2,364 years of recovery!

Advocacy & Membership Tents

New to this year’s event were a PRO-ACT membership/information tent and an advocacy tent. The advocacy tent was particularly relevant and popular due to the approaching election.

Visitors to the tent learned how to become advocates for recovery and furthered their understanding of their rights as citizens and members of the recovery community. Many read and signed an enlarged poster of The Recovery Bill of Rights. Participants also used on-site computers to write to their state senators regarding two separate bills that are up for a vote. Volunteers were available to answer questions and assist, and informational posters were also on display (see a snapshot of two posters). This would not have been possible without the volunteerism of Aleks Mednis from APM Systems, Inc. Aleks donated laptops and provided his expertise to get the computers online. The advocacy tent would like to acknowledge and thank Aleks for his support of Recovery Walks!

In addition to writing letters, participants learned how to use voting machines and many also registered to vote. An official from the City of Philadelphia instructed participants on how to vote using two booths with real voting machines. Tom Corbett, the Attorney General of Pennsylvania, and his staff spent some time in the tent to respond to questions and offer their praise. Attorney General Corbett congratulated PRO-ACT for providing voter registration and educating consumers on how to advocate for themselves about issues that are important to them. The tent registered 58 new voters!

Thank you to our advocacy tent committee members:

Thank You

Furthermore, we want to thank everyone that made this event possible. This includes our Recovery Walks! Committee, the 100+ volunteers that worked on the day of the walk, PRO-ACT staff, event speakers, event sponsors, and of course, everyone that joined us on Sunday to support recovery.

Recovery Walks! Committee Members

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