Greg interviews Tim Elliott, the Executive Director of Re-Entry & Addiction Recovery at The Dalton Foundation, which has worked to provide assistance to organizations meeting the medical needs of the less fortunate since 2001. Though he first began his career in cars, Tim has spent the past thirty years as an advocate and change coach, as well as a facilitator for faith-based recovery in Akron.
Greg asks Tim about the difficulty in connecting former inmates and substance abusers with service providers that can assist them in re-entry. Tim explains that due to the relative newness of the recovery industry, there’s a lack of regulation, which leads to an uneven standard of providers – or no listed providers at all. “Unfortunately, what happens is any new developing market place – we’ll call the recovery industry a developing market place – there is not a lot of regulation. So… you’re going to have good and bad providers. For example, there’s a great organization in Columbus called Ohio Recovery Housing, which is an organization to create standards of operations for organizations, which is a good thing. But if you go to their resource tab, and let’s say I’m looking for a Women’s Facility in Summit County Ohio – a recovery house – there’s only one listed. That’s all that’s available on their resource tab. Now it’s the only one that is going by their standards, [but] I know that there is a half a dozen to ten that are actually in operation. The challenge is they’re not operating under any guidelines or standards.”
To fix this, he shares that the Dalton Foundation believes clearly marking vetted/non-vetted organizations is necessary. “We believe the market place… should [have] that information; if somebody is following a standard or guideline or if there is an accreditation… We believe that, in effect, will help clean up the market.”
Listen to the podcast to discover how The Dalton Foundation’s user-friendly database, reLink.org, is working to make this happen.
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