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With only days left in New York’s legislative session, we need your help to bring the Nonreligious Recovery Options bill to a vote. If passed, this bill would ensure that all individuals mandated by a court in New York to attend recovery support programs are provided with secular options. The bill has passed the Assembly and passed out of committee in the Senate, but has not been brought to the Senate floor for a vote.

If you live in New York, please take five minutes to make a phone call and/or send an email to Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins using the instructions below. Hearing from even just a few local constituents could make the difference on whether this bill is brought to the Senate floor for a vote—or not.

Today, individuals with criminal justice involvement account for 47% of all treatment admissions to New York State’s Office of Addiction Services and Support. However, the only support groups available for many participants are based on the traditional and faith-based 12-step model. Too often, individuals in the court system are denied access to nonreligious recovery options that are consistent with their values and personal beliefs.

We need our leaders to pass the Nonreligious Recovery Options bill to make sure New Yorkers have multiple pathways to recovery available to them, including secular options. Your voice can help make this a reality. Act now using the instructions below.

Read more about the act at https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/bills/2021/S7313.

Thank you for your activism and continued support!
Adrienne Miller
President/CEO
Women for Sobriety, Inc.

PHONE CALL INSTRUCTIONS:
If you get a voicemail, please leave a voicemail using the script below. If someone picks up, it will likely be staff. If you’re extra short on time, the most important thing to remember are to establish you are a New York voter, mention that you are a member of Women for Sobriety, and say you are calling to urge the Majority Leader to bring S.7313A, the Nonreligious Recovery Options bill, to the floor for a vote.

Phone number: (518) 455-2715

Script for phone call:

• My name is (NAME). I’m a New York voter in (CITY/NEIGHBORHOOD IN NEW YORK) and a member of Women for Sobriety
• While I am grateful to Majority Leader Stewart-Cousins for her leadership on passing and funding substance use-related services and programs, I am calling to express concern that with only a few days left in session, S.7313A, the Nonreligious Recovery Options bill has not come up for a vote.
• This bill is very simple—it will ensure that nonreligious recovery options are made available for individuals mandated by courts to attend substance use treatment programs.
• This bill protects the First Amendment constitutional rights of individuals in the criminal justice system by preventing our state from coercing attendees to attend faith-based programs. Faith-based recovery programs work for many people, but not for everyone. This bill ensures that multiple pathways to recovery are available so that individuals can choose programs that will work for them.
• I strongly urge the Majority Leader to bring S.7313A, the Nonreligious Recovery Options bill to the floor for a vote. Thank you.

EMAIL INSTRUCTIONS:
Simply copy-paste the subject line and text below into an email to Majority Leader Stewart-Cousins and fill in the blanks (your name and address). Feel free to edit the email and put it into your own words. If you have a personal connection to the issue, please feel free to share it.

Email: [email protected]
SUBJECT LINE: Bring S.7313A, Nonreligious Recovery Options, to a vote
TEMPLATE EMAIL (make sure to fill in the blanks):

Dear Majority Leader Stewart-Cousins,

As a voter and member of Women for Sobriety, I am writing to urge you to bring S.7313A to a vote. This bill that expands treatment options for New Yorkers in the criminal justice system. If enacted, this legislation would ensure that all individuals who are mandated to attend recovery support programs are provided with secular options.

While faith-based programs work for many, they don’t work for everyone. It is critical that individuals on the path to recovery be provided with options so that they can choose what works best for them. Furthermore, we must ensure that our criminal justice system is protecting the First Amendment rights of all New Yorkers. This bill shifts the burden of protecting this constitutional right from the individual, who often does not have the resources to advocate for themselves, to the state.

In recent years, New York has seen a 200% increase in opioid-related deaths, impacting our families, friends and neighbors. Unfortunately, those in the court system are routinely denied access to secular treatment options, including those where Medication Assisted Treatment (MAT) plays a central role in the recovery process.

I urge you to protect the First Amendment rights and expand recovery options for New Yorkers in the criminal justice system by bringing S.7313A, the Nonreligious Recovery Options bill, to a vote.Sincerely,
(NAME)

(ADDRESS)

Do you have a particular interest or expertise that you can share with the WFS community during our 2022 Annual Conference?

WFS is planning for our in person conference and seeking workshop presenters for the event.  The conference theme of “Bloom” opens up a very wide range of potential workshop topics related to recovery and emotional and spiritual growth.

Please consider giving back to WFS by designing and presenting a workshop. We have so many talented and knowledgeable women in our community that the possibilities are endless for topic and content.

Proposals for workshop topics are due January 31st, 2022.

Learn more about presenting here.

Feminism & Women For Sobriety
by Jean Kirkpatrick, PhD

In the early years, I was always startled when persons referred to WFS as part of the feminist movement and yet, I see quite clearly that it is.  Although I always knew that the values sought for through the Program are for women to be free from domination from others and to find themselves, I just never spoke of the WFS Program in this way.

But what is feminism?  Has there ever been a movement or a word so badly treated and misunderstood?

To me, feminism is the right of women to seek equality in jobs, in payment for those jobs, and to be treated equally under the law.  But it is so much more then that too.

To me, it means that we are to seek an equal status for ourselves and, in order to do that, we must find ourselves, define ourselves, and believe in ourselves.  And that’s what our program seeks to do.

Too long we have been treated unfairly through the overriding dominance of the male system, yet there was none other.  Too often I think we wanted to rebel but didn’t put anything in the place of the rebellion.

We cannot rise up against something unless we have something better to offer and I believe that can only happen when we change ourselves from dependent persons to independent persons, women strong in our beliefs, convictions, and commitments.

It is too easy to cry out about inequality without any substance underneath.  The WFS Program should provide a way to make us strong in beliefs that provide substance to our outcry.  Improving ourselves ultimately improves society.

One therapist, Miriam Greenspan, believes our thinking is at fault.  Women fail to recognize the ways that men depend upon women and we end up thinking of ourselves as ‘dependent,’ when, in reality, it is men who are dependent.  Women have been misled in our thinking.  Society continues to accommodate male independence and thwart women’s, and so we, as women, have impaired thinking.

Women for Sobriety stands for women’s strengths.  Both the program and the organization are dedicated to women finding inner strengths to create, and live the kind of lives we desire to live.

In the late 1980’s, WFS program founder Dr. Jean Kirkpatrick wrote the above article for the Sobering Thoughts newsletter. She also wrote frequently about women’s rights and the gender pay gap, and openly lamented about the Equal Rights Amendment not being ratified. Additionally, Jean testified twice before senate sub-committees advocating regarding the gender-specific needs of women with substance use disorders. Indeed, Jean was not afraid of “getting political” when it mattered – when it was relevant to the cause of empowering women so that they could come into their own and take control of their lives and their addictions.

As feminist theory has evolved, it has broadened to recognize the concept of intersectionality. This is the idea that in addition to the challenges faced by all women in our culture by virtue of their gender, some women face additional systemic and social barriers that compound marginalization and pushes them further to the fringes. These systemic and social barriers can range from the more invisible challenges such as education level, class, socioeconomic status, and sexuality, to more visible differences such as physical disability and non-white skin tone.

It’s not an “I-have-it-worse-than-you” competition. It’s about acknowledging and recognizing imbalances so that we can correct them.

It has taken me a long time to de-stigmatize my own feelings about having prejudices toward people with different skin tones. I was raised to believe that only bad or evil people are “racist”, and I initially felt really defensive when I started to look at my own subconscious prejudices. “But I’m a good person!” was my underlying thought. It took me a long time and a lot of work to accept that my deeply ingrained biases didn’t make me a bad person — they are simply an inevitable result of growing up in a society that was built on a racialized system. We have come a long way, yes, but there is still a very long way to go.

It’s a lot like recovery. I had to come out of denial so that I could grow.

I recognize my privilege as a white woman. Even though I have experienced a number of other sources of marginalization, my skin color is not one of them. I recognize that I sometimes jump too quickly to sharing my own, unrelated challenges when my friends of color share their stories of racial discrimination. I recognize that I am quick to say that I advocate against racism while in actuality I take very little concrete action to change the system that perpetuates it. I recognize that even though this topic is important to me and highly relevant to WFS (our program surveys show that a disproportionate number of our participants – over 90% – are white), my own insecurities and privilege kept me from addressing this critical topic sooner.

This is also a lot like recovery. It’s not a single event to unlearn a lifetime of conditioning, it is an ongoing process.

Today, I am following Jean’s example and taking a risk. I am “getting political” about something that matters to me, and something that I believe should matter to every single woman that walks through the proverbial WFS door. I am scared to be “going there” in my official capacity as WFS President/CEO. I feel really vulnerable sharing these things in this public way, and as a public figure in this organization. Yet I know that my discomfort does not come close to comparing to the discomfort of my 4C Sisters of color. And I know that as a woman in a leadership position, my conscience would not be clear if I did not respond in some way to the issues that are currently being raised.

Today, I accept the responsibility of proactively learning from the resources available to me.

So here I am, asking my 4C Sisters:

• What are we, the white women of WFS, willing to do to make sure that we fulfill the mission of WFS – to help all women find their individual path to recovery?
• How can we effectively reach out to women of color and help them feel welcomed and included in our groups?
• How can we hold each other accountable for creating a community that not only welcomes, but actively celebrates, every woman who finds our New Life Program?

Image Credit: https://iwda.org.au/what-does-intersectional-feminism-actually-mean/