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Changes UK founder to raise awareness of recovery service cuts with Great Birmingham run

The founder of a leading Birmingham-based addiction recovery charity has decided to tackle the Simplyhealth Great Birmingham run to raise awareness of brutal cuts to treatment services for addiction and the homeless.

Steve Dixon, founder of Changes UK, is taking matters into his own hands on Sunday to ensure free treatment places continue to be available and Birmingham maintains its reputation as the ‘Recovery Capital of the UK’.

The social entrepreneur will be joined on the 13.1 mile course by his wife Debbie, staff members and a number of recovery champions, who owe their lives to the organisation’s services.

By running together they hope to raise over £20,000 to continue the pioneering work at Recovery Central in Digbeth, home to the City’s first and only dry bar.

“Prior to Changes UK being launched 10 years ago, Birmingham’s recovery community looked pretty bleak… today it is a thriving community of thousands of people that have purpose and are a valuable, responsible asset to the community,” explained Steve, who prior to starting his training plan had not been running since he was a young boy.

“If the current crisis continues, scaling back our services will have devastating consequences to the local recovery community.”

Birmingham-born Steve, who has fourteen years of sustained recovery from his own addiction, founded Changes out of his passion to bring innovative support services to the City that were not accessible to him during his repeated attempts to stay clean and live a life with purpose.

He is hoping to use the high profile event to issue a rallying call for the local community and business to wake up to the harsh reality of the cuts.

“Despite drug related deaths and homelessness hitting record levels we are under increasing pressure to find innovative income streams to sustain our services,” continued Steve.

“Our vision is to be self-funded, through our social enterprises and partnership projects underpinning all our services. However, we need help now and I wanted to shout to the city that the current situation we are facing is at crisis point.”

“Training for the Great Birmingham Run is a huge challenge for me. There have been times when I felt it was completely beyond me. My legs were in so much pain I couldn’t move and I wanted to give up, but Changes UK is all about a culture of going to any lengths to help others.

“How can I possibly give up and not do whatever it takes in my power to give another person the hope of a fulfilling life like I now enjoy?”

He went on to add: “I’m not alone. With the media interest around the event, we agreed as a team that it was an ideal opportunity to raise both critical funds and continue to remove the stigma associated with addiction. We are appealing to the city for help.”

Changes UK provides a detox service, community-based rehabilitation, supported and move on housing and opportunities to gain accredited qualifications, volunteering and work experience for 300 service users in the city every year.

Individuals at the beginning of their recovery journey are supported 24-hours a day by qualified staff and specially trained volunteer peer mentors.

They also have access to the Recovery Academy, which, over an eight-week full time programme, begins to build the knowledge and skills they need in order to maintain recovery, build a personal recovery support network and gain qualifications to gain employment and learn to live a fulfilling and purposeful life.

“Does this approach work? The proof is in the results, with 78% of our service users maintaining their recovery compared to a national average of just 8%. We know we are a good investment, delivering a huge social return of £14 for every £1 we spend,” continued Steve.

“Central to our performance is our 8-week Academy. This is fully funded by Changes and currently available free of charge to service users. It costs £250per week for each person to go through and provides support, education, training and interaction with the community. This is really good value for money when you consider repetitive treatment – that doesn’t really work – costs £1000s and £1000s.”

He concluded: “The decline of grant funding continually forces us to look for alternative sources of finance. This can be a good thing and has seen us adopt a mandate to educate corporates on the shared interest of community regeneration and recovery.

“This has already attracted the backing of Jaguar Land Rover and TK Maxx and we are hoping that this is just the start of a sustained campaign and more partners coming forward.”

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Russ Cockburn .