YPR - Louisville, KY

YPR’s mission is to provide the life skills and peer supports that young people need to thrive and be successful in long-term recovery from addiction to drugs and alcohol. The YPR Louisville, KY chapter is one of the most established chapters in the history of the organization. Our approach has been widely successful due to seamless collaboration with the already thriving recovery community as a w

hole. The strategy we have found is focused on consistency with hosting bi-weekly pro-social events that have been well attended for almost 9 years; Ultimate Frisbee in the summer and Recovery Dodgeball in the winter. The Louisville chapter has several different sub committees made up of people in various stages of their recovery journeys. We have a group of volunteers who commit to monthly Community Clean Ups which consist of picking up hazardous paraphernalia off the streets of downtown while distributing Narcan and Fentanyl test strips. We bring the YPR Overview workshop into inpatient treatment centers quarterly to promote our recovery support services and help recruit new chapter members. We have a crew of Recovery hiking leaders that plan different locations to meet up and hike about once a month. We have a wonderful volunteer Deepak Chopra certified Meditation facilitator Charlotte who leads a virtual meditation for our group every two weeks on Zoom. What we have formed here in Louisville is what we call our "YPR family", we all see each other at least once a week at our weekly All Recovery Meetings and chat in a private Facebook messenger group all day everyday. Our meetings are held at the Louisville Recovery Community Connection which is a state of the art Recovery Community Center in the heart of downtown that we helped to plan and open a few years back. Our chapter has annual chili cook offs, Recovery Super Bowl parties, Derby parties, costume parties for Halloween, Friendgivings, and Ugly Christmas Sweater parties. The public YPR Louisville page has nearly 3,000 followers and we pride ourselves on being detail oriented when it comes to social media promotion for all our resources and current events in the community. We host resource tables at various events throughout the year where we help recruit and engage the community. The Louisville YPR chapter has been featured on dozens of news stories throughout the years ranging from Recovery Snowtubing, Recovery Concert Bonfires, and Unity BBQs where we teamed up with local law enforcement to help smash the stigma between people with substance use disorder and the police. I cannot emphasize enough that our chapter's upward momentum and success has been a team effort and without the many hard working volunteers, there would be no YPR family here that many of us have come to know and love.