An episode of the Changing the Conversation podcast
Conni Wells shares insights on family and caregiver peer support with host Livia Davis. This episode is part of a series where we share the wisdom amassed by recovery leaders over the past 5 decades and reflect on the journeys that have laid groundwork for today’s recovery movement.
December 1, 2025
[Music]
Livia Davis, Host (00:05): Hello and welcome to Changing the Conversation. I’m your host, Livia Davis. I’m the Chief Learning Officer at C4 Innovations. Our topic today is learning from our recovery elders to inform our work as recovery leaders. My guest is Conni Wells. She’s calling in from Tennessee. Conni is a parent, grandparent, family member of children, youth, and adults with special healthcare needs, including mental and emotional disorders.
(00:37): Conni has over 30 years of experience in recovery, leadership, training and development, and has deep expertise in providing supports to help families understand their loved one’s needs, their own needs and whole family wellness as a priority during the recovery journey. Hello, Conni. Thanks for joining us today.
Conni Wells, Guest (00:59): Thank you, Livia. This is so exciting.
Livia (01:02): What would you like the next generation of recovery leaders to know about the history of the family, caregiver, peer support movement?
Conni (01:11): So leaders from yesteryear, and you call us elders, and I never really thought of us as elders, but I suppose we are, we were talking about what do we have to pass on and how important is it that we pass some of these things on to others and make sure that they learn from the things that worked well for us and the things that didn’t work so well. And one of the things that just came to the surface right away is we were bold.
(01:51):
We had to be bold. And sometimes that was really scary, but we followed people around to see what meetings they were going to and we crashed the meeting. If it was open to the public, we came in. If it wasn’t open to the public, we asked why. If it wasn’t open to the public, we asked if there was a reason and if there was a possibility that we could just sit in and listen to the things that they were talking about so that we could learn more.
(02:28):
And so often they were very generous and let us in. Maybe later on, they were sorry, but we weren’t. We learned so much from them. They were so willing to teach us, and I think they still are today. And we need to take advantage of the fact that there are so many things going on that we need to look at and say, “If I’m going to make a change, I need to know more about that. And in order to know more about that, I’m going to have to put myself out there.”
Livia (03:10): I love everything that you just said about being bold. Thank you so much. I’m wondering if you could take just a couple of minutes to let folks know about family peer support, because some of our audience members may not know exactly what that is. Would you do that?
Conni (03:30): Family peer support is the critical piece that cannot be missing. We cannot speak for one person, and it will get picked up on right away as selfishness, broadcasting for an individual, not as a family. And we don’t want to do that. We want it to come across as this is a family, this is a family in need, and this is a family who’s going to have to have someone behind them all across the way.
(04:12):
And when I say that, I mean that we take one family who has people in it who are extraordinary at supporting other families, and you send them out and you have them support other families. And in that way, we’re teaching families how to pay it forward. It’s kind of that pay it forward idea. It’s growing today. Today we’re seeing more and more people pay forward what it is that they know about helping one another grow, survive, recover.
(05:05):
And the stories that I have, the things that I’ve endured, things that I have learned from my growth, the things that I have learned from just being alive, those things that I can take and I can hand them off, as if we were in a relay, and I can hand them off to another family for them to run the relay themselves, that’s what we’re doing. That’s peer support. That’s paying it forward.
Livia (05:50): That’s so interesting and such a needed way to think about peer support and paying it forward from what we’ve learned. Are there places that I could learn more about how to become one or is it an organic process?
Conni (06:09): Oh, it’s both. It is definitely both. As you sit in a doctor’s office, a therapist’s office, any place like that, and you look around and you see other people like yourself, and you look in their faces and you say to yourself, “Wow, they’re stumbling just like I am.” And you wonder to yourself, “How do they make it? How do they make it?” Then you walk out of there and you run into places where you see other folks that aren’t making it and other folks that are making it. And you wonder to yourself, “Wow, how are they making it and why aren’t they making it?”
(07:00):
I like to go to the store, not to buy things, but I’ll put a couple of things in my grocery cart. I like to walk around and I like to look at families, and I like to make comments to the families that would encourage them. So if it’s a family of six and it looks like mom is struggling and mom has her hands full and dad seems to be overwhelmed and on his phone playing his favorite game or checking the latest score, mom’s frustrated and baby’s wailing, I love to walk up to them and tell that baby how beautiful they are.
(07:57):
I love to tell some of the other kids, “Oh my gosh, you are amazing. I bet you get good grades in school.” And they might say, “Well, not really.” And I said, “I bet you could,” and they’ll smile really big as if they’re an inner achiever. I like to find inner achievers in the store and bring them out. It just feels good to go out there and find families and encourage them. I try to do this at least a couple times a month, if not more.
(08:40):
Not only do I enjoy that, but I think it’s another way of doing peer to peer reach out. Looking at families, it’s a way of telling them, “I believe in you. I believe in you.” There’s some families out there that they need the encouragement of I like your tennis shoes.
Livia (09:10): Oh, it’s so powerful, Conni. I love that story and I love that you’re doing that monthly. It provides a very concrete example of what family peer support can look like and also opens the door to possible future exploration of ways to maybe share resources to and with that family.
Conni (09:39): I did that yesterday at a store. This kid was screaming. And one of them wouldn’t hold onto the cart, and the dad was being really obnoxious. He had on a shirt for some football team, not my football team. I stopped him and I said to him, “So how do you think the team’s going to do this year?”
(10:06):
And he talked with me a little bit and yelled at the kid, and I told the kid how cute he was and was he anxious for school to be out and so on. We parted ways. My husband looked at me and said, “Do you know them?” And I said, “Yes, I do.” And he said, “Who are they?” And I said, “Bob, they’re us 20 years ago.”
Livia (10:35): Yeah, powerful. Goodness. Talk about paying it forward. Thank you, Conni. So if you think about the future of recovery and where the field is going, especially family and caregiver peer support, since that’s your deep expertise, what are your reflections regarding the future of family peer and peer support that you would want to share with some of our listeners?
Conni (11:04): They have get tough, a lot tougher. Don’t wait for opportunity to come to you. I’m pretty much talking about legislation, about the power of change, the power of looking for opportunities, of making programs that would fit the needs of the people that we serve. And if we don’t see that… I hear so many people saying, “Well, we don’t have that. We don’t have that. We don’t have that.”
(11:47):
Oh my gosh, make it. Make it. Write a grant for it. Ask for money for it. Beat the streets. Tell people that this is what you have to have. And that if you don’t get it, that there’s so many things that are going to happen that it’s going to be a disaster for certain families, and we don’t want to see that. So I think that it’s really important that we look way forward and not just look at today.
(12:21):
Today looks hard. Today looks really hard, and I hear people talk about how difficult today is. But today won’t be here forever if you don’t take the time and I like to say the guts to step forward, to find those meetings, to step into those meetings, to raise your voice, to raise your hand. I love to say, “Yeah, but.” We used to have a fictitious family in Immokalee, Florida, and I used to say, “Yeah, but what about the Smith family in Immokalee, Florida?”
(13:18):
One time one of the governor’s assistants came up and said, “Yes, Governor Chiles would like to know what he can do specifically for the Smith family in Immokalee, Florida.” And I’m like, “There is no Smith family. It’s an example.” And we both just had a good laugh, but we need to have people doing that more and I don’t see it happening. I see them having organizational meetings and I think that’s wonderful. And the organizations are getting stronger and stronger and stronger.
(13:58):
But we used to follow people around that we knew were going to meetings and we’d follow them into the meeting and sit. We knew we couldn’t sit at the table and we’d sit on an outer row. And we learned and we learned and we learned. And pretty soon we were asked to sit at the table and pretty soon we were asked to find other families to sit at the table. And that’s what I see as the future for us. We’ve got to keep it going. There was a lag. We’ve got to build the bridge.
Livia (14:39): So I hear you talking about getting back to the roots of the family peer support recovery movement. It started with a lot of advocacy that really was one-on-one is what I’m hearing you say and following folks around and going to meetings and attending meetings before being invited to the table.
(14:59):
So thank you for that. You have recently shifted your focus to work with youth experiencing homelessness and exploitation. And I’m wondering if you would mind sharing two to three lessons learned about supporting youth that you would want our audience to keep in mind to help them gain or reclaim a life in the community of their choosing.
Conni (15:24): We have learned that no matter where we’re at and no matter how dangerous, you have to be where they are. And this is not easy. This is very difficult. We have walked the streets with them, followed them to their arrest. They got arrested because they weren’t in a home. And followed them to court. So often they’d be sitting in court and their heads would spin around looking to see if we were there, and we would be there and give them a thumbs up just to let them know that, “Yeah, we’re here.”
(16:14):
Not thumbs up that, “Boy, we’re glad that you did that,” but it’s a thumbs up saying, “We’re here. We’re here.” We had to help them build their own safety net. Because for whatever reason, they have chosen this culture of life. If they’ve chosen this culture, we have to help them be safe. And this is critical because we are losing them off the streets. Right now in our small community, we have lost four kids between the ages of 17 and 23 in the past three years that have been snatched, and they’re gone.
(17:08):
And I say to myself, “How can that happen?” So I think it’s critically important that we all understand that we’re not doing a very good job of the exploitation point. Maybe we’re not teaching them well enough. Maybe they’re putting themselves at a risk that we haven’t taught them about, so we need to do a better job at that. And finally, when they are on the street, and most of them are doing drugs, I will say that, most of them are using substances, we need to provide their families with some kind of support after they leave.
(17:56):
There’s a reason why they’re gone. And we need to provide the family with counseling, some kind of support that allows that family to grow in a way that allows them to bring the kids home safely, bring the kids home so that the kids are comfortable and bring those kids home in a way that allows them to feel like this is home, this is where I belong, and this is where I want to stay.
Livia (18:33): That is very powerful. So I heard you say it’s really important to be there. You need to have a safety plan to help teach them how to be safe, and also we need to provide families with support. Thank you for that, Conni. Those are three key takeaways and very concrete. So what keeps you going, Conni?
Conni (18:59): Layla keeps me going. Layla is my granddaughter. She’s been missing now for 23 months. She’s one of them that was walking the streets, had been doing drugs, and she disappeared just like that. Walked out of a hotel, walked out behind a factory into some bushes, and poof, she was gone. Nobody knows where. Police can’t find her. FBI can’t find her. Nobody can find her.
(19:42):
Someone knows where Layla is at, and that keeps me going. I was done. I was all done. And then Layla went missing and I couldn’t be done anymore. All of a sudden, I realized there was this population that I hadn’t touched yet. And I thought to myself, Conni, you’ve got to reach out. Maybe this is the reason that I went through everything I had already gone through.
(20:20):
Maybe this is the reason that I went through all of the disability advocacy. Maybe this is why I struck it up with governors or walked up to a governor and said, “Know what? They’re talking about you in Washington, DC and saying that you’re sending kids down the river.” Maybe that’s why I went through that because I need to be ready now to do that with the police. I need to do that for Layla. I need to do that for Holland. I need to do that for Savannah.
(21:04):
I need to do that for the kids. And their parents don’t have any idea what they’re up against. None. And we walk the streets, we knock on the door of trap houses. Never done that before. And knock on that door and they open the door and I’m scared to death. And I show him a picture of Layla and the guy grabs the picture and he hugs it, and he says, “My Layla. I love my Layla. We all love our Layla. Our Layla’s gone. Where is our Layla?”
(21:56):
And he gave me back the picture and he said, “We need our Layla.” He was missing Layla as badly as we were. So that’s what keeps me going is Layla. So because of that, we’ve started an organization called Layla’s Hope, and we’re working really hard to help families look for all the Layla’s out there and to provide the kind of support that the families have to have in order to endure not having their children and not even knowing where to begin looking for them.
Livia (22:46): Thank you, Conni. It’s almost like we got back to where we started, the importance of being bold and doing things that may scare you. Seems such an important piece of this work. And the fact that you have so much experience to lean on and you have the lived experience and you’ve gone ahead and started Layla’s Hope to help others just is an incredible testament to the leader that you are. And it has just been such a privilege to talk to you today and sharing your wisdom with our audience. Conni Wells, thank you for joining us today.
Conni (23:36): Thank you so much for inviting me on behalf of all the families that we’ve worked with, and thank you on behalf of all the Layla’s in the country who we have no idea where they’re at.
Livia (23:54): Thank you so much. And to our listeners, do check our show notes for a link to Layla’s Hope to learn more about the work that Conni Wells has started. Join us next time on Changing the Conversation.
Erika Simon, Producer (24:10): Visit c4innovates.com and follow us on LinkedIn and YouTube for more resources to grow your impact. Thank you for joining us. This episode was produced by Erika Simon and Christina Murphy. Our theme song was written and performed by Peter Hanlon. Join us next time on Changing the Conversation.
Listen to other episodes in the Recovery Elders series.