An episode of Changing the Conversation podcast
Bill Stauffer shares insights on recovery movement history and how current leaders can come together 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.
September 8, 2025
[Music]
Livia Davis, Host (00:05): Hello and welcome to Changing the Conversation. I’m your host, Livia Davis, Chief Learning Officer at C4 Innovations. Today’s conversation is part of a podcast series called Learning from our Recovery Elders to Inform our Work as Recovery Leaders. We delve into the profound wisdom amassed by recovery leaders over the past five decades. We want to make sure we are illuminating the journeys of many of the people who have laid the groundwork for today’s recovery movement. Our aim is to not only preserve their invaluable insights, but also to inspire and guide current and future leaders to continue to advance recovery.
(00:48):
By sharing some of the history and lessons of recovery leaders, we hope to inform the path forward for the next 50 years. My guest today is Bill Stauffer, the executive director of the Pennsylvania Recovery Organization Alliance (PRO●A) since 2012. Bill is in long-term recovery and is a writer on the history and future of the American Recovery Movement and trains on a myriad of topics in the field of substance use, treatment and recovery. In 2019, he was honored as the Vernon Johnson Award for Individual Recovery Advocate by Faces & Voices of Recovery at America Honors Recovery. Hello, Bill, thanks for joining us today.
Bill Stauffer, Guest: (01:34): It’s great to be here. Thank you so much for having me.
Livia (01:37): Bill, you have now been working in the field of recovery for many years, and can you tell us a little bit about how you got into doing this work?
Bill (01:47): I got into recovery 38 years ago, and I like to think of myself as a former young person still in recovery, and I got into the field not very long after I got in recovery. I got into work at an entry level position. I did not have a college degree. In fact, I barely completed high school, not because I couldn’t, but because my addiction had impacted my learning. So, I got into the field as a tech in 1988 and I worked my way up through the field. When I got into the field, you could become a counselor without a college degree.
(02:23):
The initial certifications for credentialing allowed for that back in that time, and I think that was an important part of my learning because I learned from the ground up and I eventually got the letters behind my name and I teach at a university, but I got in the field from the ground and I think that that’s really relevant for our field, or at least from my knowledge about how things worked. And since then I’ve had the opportunity to do a lot of different things. I’ve had some fantastic mentors along the way, and I’m still as excited to do this work as I was many, many years ago when I started. Even though so much has changed about the work and how it is done.
Livia (03:04): That’s just an incredible journey if you think about it. Could you take just a moment to explain how you became the executive director of the Pennsylvania Recovery Organization Alliance?
Bill (03:18): Before that, I had been running a long-term residential treatment program, which I had run for 14 years. And I had been involved in advocacy work around addiction recovery. I had worked with some of the people who had been involved with PRO●A, like Dona Dmitrovic, who was the initial executive director of PRO●A. She now runs Office of Recovery for SAMHSA (Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration). But when they were looking around, my name came up and I did an interview. I wasn’t actually looking for a job, but they convinced me to come in for an interview. And when I thought about it as the opportunity it was, I decided to take the job and I haven’t looked back. It has been an amazing ride, and I’ve learned so much and it’s just been an honor to be involved with PRO●A, one of the initial Recovery Community Organizations (RCOs) in the country. There were a number before us, but not too many. So, it’s been a wonderful ride.
Livia (04:16): Thank you so much. You recently co-authored a blog with David Best titled, The Arc of the Recovery Movement History Ultimately Bends Towards Expansion where you both lay out a framework and acknowledge the efforts and accomplishments of the generation of leaders that came before us. Can you talk about that framework for a few minutes so that our audience can really understand what the article was all about?
Bill (04:43): Sure. First, a little history on it, a number of us, I’ve been writing for Recovery Review, which is a blog, for about five or six years, and a number of us who write for that in recent months have had some discussions that there are people in our field that have not been exposed to the writing of William White. So, we would pick key articles and write about him. And I was writing about one way back from 1989 where he was talking about six systems with somebody by the name of John Du Cane. As I was writing it occurred to me that we could summarize some of the, what I would call laws of recovery in simple points that identify how there are rises of recovery movements, and then there are periods of time where they go into retrograde. And so I wrote that up and I wrote an article after that. First, after I wrote these laws, sort of draft laws, I thought about it, I said, “jeez, I’ve taken, which is primarily William White’s work”.
(05:46):
For 35 years he investigated recovery history in the United States, which it took him many, many years to write Slaying the Dragon. But after I wrote up these summary laws, I contacted Bill because I thought, who am I to do this? And I said, “Bill, I’ll never publish this unless you think it’s okay.” And he looked at it and he said he couldn’t have written them better himself. So, I put an article out called Considering the Facets of White’s Laws of Recovery, sort of going through the law of retrograde where things fall apart because they lose authenticity and then how they’re reformed when the recovery community comes back together and starts a new recovery movement. Right after I wrote that, I was down in Charlotte and I shared it with David Best and he liked it, but he said that he thought I had been a little bit too pessimistic that we were making forward progress, and he made some really great points.
(06:45):
I initiated that article, the Arc of Recovery Movement, and then invited him to join me in writing it. And essentially what I’ve just said, that there are periods of retrograde where they fall apart and then reformation where they come back together. But ultimately, if we look at the long history of recovery in America, we’re making forward progress and we’ve done things like shift away from a fragmented acute care model. We’ve made recovery visible in America, and we’ve moved from a pathology orientation into a strength-based orientation. So, those are things that have occurred over the last 25 years that we’ve accomplished that are not going to be able to be put back in a box.
Livia (07:29): I love that. It’s such a good background and history even of the origins of this article, and I love that you brought in Bill White. And so can you just share who he is just for our audience?
Bill (07:42): William White, I would characterize him as the principal thought leader of the New Recovery Advocacy Movement (NRAM). There’s no person alive who has done more to think about the recovery movement, our past, future and present than William White. He’s written Slaying the Dragon. He wrote a book called Recovery Rising. He wrote books called Culture of Addiction, Culture of Recovery. He’s wrote so many different books and his thoughts really help pull together the recovery movement in the United States from the mid-nineties on, although he’s just been tremendously influential over the course of his life.
Livia (08:27): Thank you so much. Can you talk a little bit more about the framework in the article?
Bill (08:35): The first law of recovery, retrograde, and I’ve developed these, looking at his work and what he learned about long-term recovery history in America, going back before we became a country, there have been recovery movements over those times, and the first law is called recovery retrograde, where things lose authenticity, where the movements fall apart, they lack cohesion, and things become top-down and pathology-oriented, which we tend to do in America. We tend to think of the pathology of addiction without looking at the strengths of recovery. And it’s during these periods of time that recovery movements come together. And having been in this field for a long time, I saw this in the nineties where we actually lost about half of our programming in the country. It was hard to get people help and treatment centers lost how to move people from treatment into the community. And through that, people across the country came together.
(09:35):
And this is the second law of recovery, reformation, where people come together. And what we had found, and I’ve written about this too, groups came together across the United States saying, “What’s occurring is not working for us.” And they came together with agreed-upon goals to start talking about recovery, to make sure that we have things that move beyond acute care into community. And they had agreed upon ways of how they were going to do these things. And Bill White has written about essentially the little engine that could. I also think that the reason why I started to write about this now is I have a sense that we’re moving into one of those periods of retrograde, and I don’t want people to lose hope. It’s during these periods of time when we actually get to reframe and re-energize what comes anew that we’re building upon all of those other things that have come before us.
Livia (10:28): I love that. And it reminds me of the Chinese symbol for crisis, which is both a threat and opportunity combined. And so it’s beautiful what you say in terms of looking at reframing some of these points in history and how we can move with them so that we can take forward strides. What do you hope people will take away from the article you wrote with David Best?
Bill (10:56): I think out of that writing and a number of different writings that it is time for us to come together and figure out where our common ground goals are. For younger readers, and you may have thoughts on this too, Livia, but there’s never been a time when our field hasn’t had a lot of controversy. We argue a lot among ourselves. We always have. The reason why that chapter in the nineties is so fascinating to me is that people came together anyway. And so we have to realize that when there are times when it’s in our common interest to come together for common goals, we need to do so. And history shows us that we’re able to do so. One of the takeaways is that, is that we can reform something new and during periods of time when programs are closing or it seems like we’re losing a focus on recovery, that’s actually the time for us to come together more.
(11:51):
And that would be what I would want people to take away from this is that they’re part of something broader. I’m reminded of the story of Harold Hughes and Harold Hughes was a senator from Iowa who helped pass the bill in 1972, creating all the public funding for addiction services in America, created NIDA (National Institute on Drug Abuse) and research around addiction. And he had attempted to form a recovery movement in the late eighties, early nineties, and it failed, or at least he thought it did, SOAR (Society of Americans for Recovery) barely got off the ground and then it folded. He didn’t live long enough to see Faces & Voices (of Recovery) come to be or the new recovery movement, but it could not have happened without him. So, even during times when we feel like we may not be making forward progress, we really are, we just have to keep at it.
Livia (12:37): I just love that because it’s so important to have hope, right? And always have some kind of thinking that can inspire us when things get tough. So, thank you for that. Do you have any thoughts on what people who want to support the recovery movement can do in terms of supporting the leaders to come together? Do you have any thoughts about that? So, if you’re an ally of recovery, what might you be able to do?
Bill (13:05): Well, one of the things that I’ve written about having norms around how we are with each other, and one of the things that Bill White wrote about when the New Recovery Advocacy Movement was coming together was that there are no leaders and everyone is a leader. So, people out there in your community, if you’re looking around your community and you’re seeing a need for recovery and you’re wondering who’s a leader is, it may be you. And so you want to be pulling people together. We need to have more conversations with each other to figure out where our common ground is so that we can formulate what we do next in the recovery movement. And so that’s what I would hope people would do is if you’re out there thinking about what you could do, look around at your local needs, things that you’re passionate about, and start pulling people together that feel similarly and start working on them. And what will happen over time, you’ll find that other groups are doing remarkably similar things, and through this we end up forming a new movement.
Livia (14:10): I think what you’re saying is profound in many ways because often what I hear in some of the networks I’m in is that people are looking for a leader or two, somebody who can galvanize, somebody that people can [get] behind, whether it’s an agency or a person within an agency. And what I’m hearing you say is that it really needs to be 1,000 leaders in communities, in all communities in the country, and that you’re forming a tapestry of a movement in that way, bubbling up from the community up rather than from a charismatic leader down, if you will. Is that right?
Bill (14:52): That’s true. I actually, with Bill White, wrote a piece a couple years ago, We Need Fewer Recovery Rock Stars and More Recovery Custodians. That rock star, having that leader, the charismatic leader, they tend to get in trouble. So, we have to actually watch out for that. Not every charismatic leader gets in trouble, but it happens often enough, and when it does, the impact for all of us are fairly tragic. If somebody gets intoxicated or they get in a car accident or they get involved in some kind of a scandal, it’s very harmful. So, we have to actually watch out for that. This idea that everybody can be a leader and it’s not one or two people. It’s all of us together.
Livia (15:35): Thank you so much. What are your thoughts about how to best advance recovery in the decades to come? I know you just talked about the importance of developing leaders everywhere, but do you have any other thoughts you want to share with our audience?
Bill (15:52): Well, first I want to encourage people to keep going. I would not have wanted to do anything different with my life, and I’m going to stick around for another decade or so. I’m not done yet, but I would urge people to keep going. Sometimes we may not even have a sense of what we’re working towards, like it’s a recovery thing where you take the next step, do the next right thing. I don’t have a set goal or where I think that this is where recovery movement should go.
(16:21):
What I believe in is that we’ll come together and it’s a matter of us taking care of each other, of us talking to each other in a way where we’re looking for where we agree on, rather than what we disagree on. And we recognize that we will stand together or we will hang separately is what they say. And that’s the story of recovery too, is that we’ve become divided. Other groups come in and it’s very harmful, not just for us, but the people that we serve. So, the idea of coming together and keep going, even when things are hard, I think is the direction to go.
Livia (16:58): Well, I certainly want to say to you, Bill, that in the time I have known you, I have known you have come back again and again and again, and have not given up. And that we certainly have had some interesting conversations back and forth with different viewpoints, not only you and I, but also some of the communities and teams and coalitions we’ve been part of and meetings we’ve attended. So, I certainly thank you for all of those very insightful and valuable lessons. Because I know I have learned a lot. Bill, what keeps you going?
Bill (17:33): Oddly enough, I think this recovery history stuff. As I’ve grown in my own recovery, I’ve learned how many people put things into…The place that I walked in for help in 1988 traces its root back to Marty Mann, I mean not directly, but because she came to my community in the forties, there were people who got invested in recovery and there was a lot of recovery capital. And when I needed help in the eighties, the place was there and it was the first generation of recovery advocates around treatment that helped build it. What I’ve learned from looking at mentors who have done things is that almost every single thing that we have accomplished at one point seemed entirely impossible, but we did it anyway. And that keeps me going because there’s a recovery story here where you don’t want to give up before the miracle happens.
(18:27):
In addiction I gave up without even trying. I failed to try and in recovery, I’m just never going to stop because even if you don’t get what you think you want, you end up getting something out of the effort. And that’s my lesson in recovery. So, I just keep going, and I do so also because I know that there are generations of people who have come before me who did the very same thing, and sometimes this is not easy. It’s not like you get a lot of rewards along the way, but it’s worth it because the rewards are, there are thousands of people in recovery because all the hundreds of thousands, millions of people in recovery because of our collective efforts. I’m not going to stop because there are millions in the future that are counting on all of us to keep going.
Livia (19:13): It reminds me of the Martin Luther King Jr. quote, “You don’t have to see the whole staircase. You only have to see the next step sometimes.” In that we don’t always know exactly how we’re going to get there, but we can take that next step.
Bill (19:31): My quote that I keep close to me is a Joseph Campbell quote, “The quest is the grail you seek.” And so we just have to enjoy the journey and realize that that’s the process.
Livia (19:43): I think it’s so important, especially right now. Thank you, Bill. Thank you for joining us today.
Bill (19:50): Thank you so much.
Livia (19:51): And to our listeners, join us next time on Changing the Conversation.
Erika Simon, Producer (19:56): 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.
Access additional “Changing the Conversation” podcast episodes