Access, Belonging, & Connection Resources

As per the ARHE standards and recommendations, honoring full student identity and experiences is essential in all program development, programming, and student support. Access, Belonging, & Connection programming seeks to explore the implications of varying identities and experiences and to cultivate shared resources with which belonging can be fostered within collegiate recovery.

If you have any questions or concerns please contact us at dei@collegiaterecovery.org.

Monthly Book Club

More than your average book club… The Access, Belonging, & Connection Book Club seeks to explore questions of gender, race, class and ability as a community. Each month a book is selected for discussion, targeting a specific question or questions. Discussion questions will be posted here prior to each book club meeting to guide your reading and/or your participation in discussion. The goal of book club is to generate a resource guide to pair with each book. This guide will be built via a survey distributed following each meeting. This means a few things:

1. If you have read the book but cannot attend the meeting, you can still participate in the month’s exploration and resource development by filling out the surveys. Many of the questions pull from lived experience and personal perspectives. Your participation is valuable to us, regardless of your level of engagement with our programming. When completing the surveys, please answer questions with as little or as much detail as you would like. We encourage you to link other videos or readings in your responses. This will help us to develop further our Equity and Belonging resource hub!
2. If you have not read the book you can still attend discussion and fill out the survey to participate.
3. If you are not a reader, you’re still a necessary part of our community, and you will be included in the community-grown resources of this Access, Belonging, and Connection program.

How can we use anger for good?
How do we balance equity and belonging work with intersecting identities?

In this collection of 15 essays and speeches, Lorde tackles racism, sexism, classism, and homophobia. She suggests that our differences offer a vehicle for social change. Lorde’s message is one of hope for anyone who may feel overwhelmed by the magnitude of work that needs to done for equity and justice. Our emotions are not weakness, they are tools. “Sometimes we are blessed with being able to choose the time, and the arena, and the manner of our revolution, but more usually we must do battle where we are standing.”

Previous Month’s Book Club Discussions

How is patriarchy harmful to men? What is mindful masculinity? How can we work to address harmful gendered expectations? How do gender roles affect substance use and recovery?

“A nonfiction investigation into masculinity, For the Love of Men provides actionable steps for how to be a man in the modern world while also exploring how being a man has evolved. Liz Plank offers a smart, insightful, and deeply researched guide for what we’re all going to do about toxic masculinity. For both women looking to guide the men in their lives and men who want to do better and just don’t know how, For the Love of Men will lead the conversation on men’s issues in a society where so much is changing but gender roles have remained strangely stagnant.” -via GoodReads

What is the importance of centering Black voices and creativity?

“In these stories, Jemisin sharply examines modern society, infusing magic into the mundane, and drawing deft parallels in the fantasy realms of her imagination. Dragons and hateful spirits haunt the flooded city of New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. In a parallel universe, a utopian society watches our world, trying to learn from our mistakes. A black mother in the Jim Crow south must figure out how to save her daughter from a fey offering impossible promises. And in the Hugo award-nominated short story “The City Born Great,” a young street kid fights to give birth to an old metropolis’s soul.” – via GoodReads

“In this incisive critique, former litigator-turned-legal-scholar Michelle Alexander provocatively argues that we have not ended racial caste in America: we have simply redesigned it. Alexander shows that, by targeting black men and decimating communities of color, the U.S. criminal justice system functions as a contemporary system of racial control, even as it formally adheres to the principle of color blindness. The New Jim Crow challenges the civil rights community–and all of us–to place mass incarceration at the forefront of a new movement for racial justice in America..” – via GoodReads

Questions for exploration: How has the racial caste system in American been redesigned? How can recovery advocacy affect racial justice?

Shrill by Lindy West

“Coming of age in a culture that demands women be as small, quiet, and compliant as possible–like a porcelain dove that will also have sex with you–writer and humorist Lindy West quickly discovered that she was anything but. Shrill provocatively dissects what it means to become selfaware the hard way, to go from wanting to be silent and invisible to earning a living defending the silenced in all caps.” -via GoodReads

Questions for exploration: What is survival in a world where not all stories are created equal and not all bodies are treated with equal respect?

All About Love by bell hooks

“All About Love offers radical new ways to think about love by showing its interconnectedness in our private and public lives. In eleven concise chapters, hooks explains how our everyday notions of what it means to give and receive love often fail us, and how these ideals are established in early childhood. Moving from the cultural to the intimate, hooks notes the ties between love and loss and challenges the prevailing notion that romantic love is the most important love of all. Visionary and original, hooks shows how love heals the wounds we bear as individuals and as a nation, for it is the cornerstone of compassion and forgiveness and holds the power to overcome shame.” -via GoodReads

Questions for exploration: How is love feminist? How is love anti-racist? What role does love play in recovery?

My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies by Resmaa Menakem

“In this groundbreaking work, therapist Resmaa Menakem examines the damage caused by racism in America from the perspective of body-centered psychology. He argues this destruction will continue until Americans learn to heal the generational anguish of white supremacy, which is deeply embedded in all our bodies. My Grandmother’s Hands is a call to action for all of us to recognize that racism is not about the head, but about the body, and introduces an alternative view of what we can do to grow beyond our entrenched racialized divide.” – via GoodReads

Questions for exploration: What is racialized trauma and how can we heal?  What part do we play in the healing of others?

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong

“On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is a letter from a son to a mother who cannot read. Written when the speaker, Little Dog, is in his late twenties, the letter unearths a family’s history that began before he was born — a history whose epicenter is rooted in Vietnam — and serves as a doorway into parts of his life his mother has never known, all of it leading to an unforgettable revelation. At once a witness to the fraught yet undeniable love between a single mother and her son, it is also a brutally honest exploration of race, class, and masculinity. Asking questions central to our American moment, immersed as we are in addiction, violence, and trauma, but undergirded by compassion and tenderness, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is as much about the power of telling one’s own story as it is about the obliterating silence of not being heard.” -via GoodReads

Question for exploration: How can creative writing and queer story telling provide new perspectives of addiction recovery work?

The ARHE Access, Belonging, and Connection in Collegiate Recovery Speaker Series

Exploring the implications of gender, race, class, and ability on substance use and recovery requires open and vulnerable conversation. The speaker series aims to facilitate this by inviting leaders from diverse communities to engage in discussion around themes of social justice, equity, and belonging. For students in CRP’s, there is often a strong focus on mitigating the damages the college experience may have on their recovery, leaving little focus on creating a place within higher education for this marginalized population. For some seeking the safety of collegiate recovery requires neglect of another, or multiple other, marginalized identities they hold. Each month’s installment in this series will target a specific question to consider when building collegiate recovery programming which can best serve and honor the full identity of each student.

If you are interested in hosting a seminar or presenting as part of our series, or if you have any questions or concerns, please contact us at dei@collegiaterecovery.org

Upcoming Sessions

Previous Sessions in the Speaker Series

Recovery for the Revolution: The Cost of Upholding Whiteness & Struggles with Substance Use

Carolyn Collado (they/them) is an Afro-Taino, queer, non-binary, neurodiverse writer, decolonial dreamer, and founding steward of Recovery for the Revolution, where they educate and provide support and healing around the impact of colonization and systemic oppression.

This presentation was designed specifically for ARHE and addresses questions such as:

• What are the systemic, historical forces that pressure us to collude with whiteness and white supremecy?
• What are the tolls of upholding whiteness on our bodies, our communities, and our planet?
• How do these pressures and effects connect to struggles with substance use? 

Pride After Pride Month

ARHE is joined by a knowledgeable panel of speakers – Kit Emslie, Kat James, Armani Balderas, and Logan Trevino-Fico – to discuss how CRPs can support and celebrate the work and recovery of LGBTQIA+ individuals. 

Resources

View previous discussion series videos below: