The following is a transcription of The Art of Volunteering Episode 12: Nancy Labov, Alumni in Recovery.
Stormy Bell (00:00): Welcome to The Art of Volunteering. I’m your host Stormy Bell. Today, we’re gonna spend our time together with Nancy Labov, Founder and CEO of Alumni in Recovery. Welcome Nancy.
Nancy Labov (00:11): Hi, thank you Stormy.
Stormy Bell (00:14): All right. Nancy has been working as a nurse in psychiatric and addiction services for more than 25 years. She also has experience as an alcohol and drug counselor and serving as an EMT. She has always believed in the power of community resourcing and people working together towards a common goal. As a woman in long term recovery for over 30 years, she has a passion for recovery and prevention and recognizes that identification and awareness are key factors. In 2014, the framework for Alumni in Recovery was founded as a result of her life experience. She began bridging schools and the valuable resource of young people in recovery. Wow. Quite a history of experience. So we’re gonna start here, please share your journey and why Alumni in Recovery is your passion.
Nancy Labov (01:07): Wow. Okay. Thanks for having me. It was really nice to get a nice little overview of me. I like that. I mean, somebody wrote it within the organization and it’s great. Like it says, I’ve been in recovery from alcohol and drug use. I [have had] addiction, addiction issues for well over 30 years. I got sober when I was 26. I came from a family that had an alcoholic undertone to say the least growing up. That has been my upbringing and I have recovered and been recovering from that since. I really believe in service and as a nurse I was still using substances.
I was a party girl, Stormy. Pure and simple. It was back in the seventies. It was just the thing to do. Then into the eighties, you know. I thought that I was just doing the normal thing and I was in complete denial. There was somewhere along the line and I don’t know how terribly ambitious I was in general, except for socializing. My father introduced me to the idea of becoming a nurse and that seemed like a good idea because I like helping others. I really like helping others. I became a nurse and during being a nursing student, I realized how really connected I was to the field of addiction.
I went and did a rotation through the rehab and I just loved it. I was still active as they say. I was using substances. I did not even think that I had a problem at that time. I wanted to be an addiction nurse so bad. It was suggested to me to be a medical surgical nurse for at least the first year. So I did and then I ended up getting sober as a result of a DWI, driving while intoxicated, in Boston cause that’s where I lived at the time and I thank God for that experience. I didn’t try to run away from it. I just took responsibility for my actions. In the process, I had a family member that was already sober that I was very close to and that person was able to, [before] I went to the drunken driving assessment program, they basically told me I should abstain given my history and given my assessment and go to a couple AA meetings a week and I was horrified. I was horrified. I could not believe this. How am I ever gonna stay sober? What about the summer? I just thought it was like such a death sentence at the time. That person was with me and told me, “why don’t you just stop?” I was like, “forever?” They’re like, “do it a day at a time. Just do it a day at a time.” That was the beginning. That was the beginning. I say this because it’s really important because my experience as a nurse and a counselor through that time is all based on the fact that I got sober at that time.
Nancy Labov (05:02): Had that person not carried the message to me, I don’t know how long it would’ve taken. I think that is a huge responsibility we have as recovering people in our world. I think recovering people have not been given enough opportunities to bridge with the general public and be able to share their experience, their strength, [and] their hope to others. I think the face of recovery is able to get the whole picture of the disease concept of addiction. I believe it’s a disease concept having worked in the field so long. There’s no doubt in my mind. I also know that the recovery process is one that all of us can just benefit from. You were saying briefly just how you got involved in what you’re doing in your podcast and how we all to the heart of us to connect with others. That human threat is the piece that can keep us so alive and so whole.
I really have learned a lot from the recovery world because they call it a we program and working together with others. So, how did I come up with this idea? I was working in the field for a long time, and it was really important that I got a full spectrum of the whole scope of treatment for people with addictive processes, substance abuse, you know, substance use disorder at the time it was addiction. They changed the name of that to encompass different people due to the opioid epidemic. When I was working in treatment there was a lot of young people that were coming through. I worked rehab and I worked at a long term treatment center for women.
I came across a lot of young people that were getting sober and clean. I then had the opportunity of bringing some young people to a school to speak to the students as my position into a long term treatment center I was at. I brought these couple of women in and they were young and they were relating to the kids through their stories of where they were at when they were that age. I saw the power. I just saw it. I saw this magnificent ability to connect and see. That’s the thing about addictive processes, it separates us. We want to detach and run away from our minds. We feel so alone. We feel isolated. We feel like we don’t belong. That’s where I was at one time in my life and that has a lot to do with why I use substances.
Nancy Labov (07:53): I always had wanted to be able to go speak to kids in schools. When I got sober at 26, I said, “oh, this would be just such a great opportunity to be able to talk to them about my experience.” I wish that I had more of that when I was growing up. I grew up in the seventies so would I have heard it? I don’t know for sure, but nobody was giving me that message. There was none of that. When I saw this go on between these students and these young people, I said, we gotta do more of this.
I thought I was just gonna start bringing the women from treatment at that time, then one day a young woman said, “I want to speak at my school. That’s my school. I wanna speak there.” Somebody I knew on the outside. I was like, “hmm. Okay.” So when I was talking to the counselor at the school, she’s like, “we would love to have her come back and speak to the students. She went to school here. What a great idea.” I was out for a run. I used to do a lot of running at that time and it came to me that, ”wait a minute, I know a couple of people that could come to this school that live in this town.” Then I was like, “oh my goodness. I could actually start pairing people with their schools.” That would be tremendous.
What I have learned over my time working in treatment is that Bill Wilson who founded Alcoholics Anonymous and started out bringing his message with Dr. Bob Smith. This was around the Akron, Ohio area. They found that by sharing their stories with others, that that person could identify and begin to see things differently. To see that there was a way out. I don’t necessarily think these kids in schools need to have the same message but we are able through our guidelines, because I knew I had to create guidelines to go into schools, to go in and speak about the pathway of addiction. Speak about their lives and root causes of where they were at when they were that age of what was going on in their lives. This is such an important factor. It at least allows people to have words to go with their feelings and identify just a bit of what they’re feeling. You know, [in] this day and age, we really need this. That’s how it started.
Stormy Bell (10:58): So you work with young people who are in recovery. What are their ages and then how many volunteers do you have? How many go out and speak?
Nancy Labov (11:09): Well we have grown. It started as a trickle of a couple of people and then little by little. That whole Field of Dreams, if you build it, they will come. Little by little people got involved and more people got involved. We’ve had hundreds of people go through Alumni in Recovery and speak in schools. We typically do 60 presentations a year reaching thousands of students. There’s 70 towns in Bergen County so that means there’s 60 high schools. Think of all the middle schools and there’s a lot of people to reach. So little by little we’re able to do that. There’s a lot of young people in recovery that would like to do this, would like to volunteer their time to speak to kids in schools.
Stormy Bell (12:09): Wow. You’ve already spoken to the power that happens between someone just a few years ahead of them possibly going through what they’re experiencing or what they’re dabbling in, which could be something more and maybe being that stark reality, “Ooh, do I want that for my life?” You know that one on one.
Nancy Labov (12:29): They also talk about things like the Good Samaritan law, which is [to] call 911 if somebody’s having a hard time, looks like they’re overdosing, and symptoms to look for. You know, so they understand the importance of that and that they won’t get in trouble by the police if they do that. [It’s] a nationwide law, a few states still don’t do it, but we try to educate them and inform them of certain warnings and also the deadliness, especially this day and age with fentanyl.
Stormy Bell (13:10): Wow. You’ve been doing this for 25 years? 30 years?
Nancy Labov (13:18): I have been doing Alumni in Recovery for… This September will be the eighth year from its time of conception but I have been in the field working my passions for at least 30, over 30 years.
Stormy Bell (13:42): Okay. How do people… is it just word of mouth? How do young people in recovery find you or do you find them? How does that all come about?
Nancy Labov (13:53): Well the world of recovery is pretty networked. It’s all over the country but somebody will know somebody and it just kind of spreads that way. Occasionally we’ll put out a flier “looking for new faces. You want to speak in schools?” Overall it’s word of mouth. I just got [a] text last night from somebody that I hadn’t talked to in a long time. “So, sorry. I’ve been working, but I’ve got Abdul here. He would be great to speak in schools.” I’m like, “great! Give him my number, we’ll talk tomorrow.” We do that a lot. I have about four people that kind of just became part of our community over the last two weeks. It kind of just ebbs and flows.
Stormy Bell (14:56): I’ve read on your website that you usually choose two young adults and then a briefed parent.
Nancy Labov (15:04): Oh yes. Thank you. We have a few different tiers of our program. The young people in recovery are our first one, and then we were asked to speak to parents for a PTO function one night back in like 2017. I went in with two of our young people and it was a nice group of people. I mean, we don’t normally get that many people, but you know, like, I mean, parents, it’s hard to get parents to come. That’s a whole other piece but I said, “you know what, this is a peer to peer approach thing that we do. I really think it’s time to bring in parents that have lost their kids to addiction related death you know, primarily overdoses.” I knew of a couple, and I said, I’m gonna reach out to this woman, Nancy. So that’s how that started. Here you’ll love this. Can I tell you one of those great stories that just like, wow.
Stormy Bell (16:06): Absolutely.
Nancy Labov (16:09): It started with Nancy and that was great. We had one parent that could speak to parent programs in the evening and allow the young people in recovery to speak in the day, empower them to be able to carry that message to kids. Then in the evening they could join with parent member. We started calling them. That somebody who had lost their kid to addiction, so they could talk to parents. But those two people come together. So one time there was a school in New Jersey here in Montvale and I was like, “oh, gee, I really would love to bring the alumni I have back to that school. Oh, I just don’t know how we’re gonna get in the door. Well, we’ll see what happens.” Sure enough. I get a little phone call and it’s this guy, Tom Canavan, who now happens to be the director of our parent program. He calls and he’s like, “oh hi. My name’s Tom Canavan, I’m an alumni of this school and I was trying to get in there to maybe speak.” He said, ”and then somebody told me that maybe I should reach out to you.” So he became our second parent member and he happened to be the parent that opened the door to get into that school. It’s just breathtaking. These local people that actually went to the school, you have one of our young recovery members and a parent who has lost their kid. That [were] coming together to speak.
The power in that is just blows me away and that these people just wanna give back. It’s just all they wanna do. Parent members turning their pain into purpose. It’s such courage for them to share these devastatingly, you know, hard. Well, they get to remember their kid in the light that they are, they don’t just share on their complete downfall. They share on the fact that they were thriving young kids that had full lives. Some of them may have had some, ADD or something but they didn’t ever choose this path. They try to point that out to the parents what to look for signs to look for and things like that. They also have guidelines and we do this so we can have a unified presence and create a brand that can be utilized anywhere.
Stormy Bell (18:57): That’s amazing. Now you’re strictly Bergen County? Are you all throughout the entire state, the region? Like what’s your footprint?
Nancy Labov (19:08): Whoa. A good question. So we are in Bergen County believe it or not. We have a Patterson chapter. Patterson, New Jersey is a city for all those that don’t know. It’s a large city that you know significantly not the same as Bergen. It’s different. It has a different population and a lot of the people are underserved communities. The good news is that we have a whole chapter of people that live in Patterson that have an Alumni in Recovery presence and want to bridge the recovery community with schools and community events [in] their community. So that’s awesome. We also have Passaic County. We have some presence in Sussex, in Warren County, out west New Jersey. We have some presence in Brick all the way down in Brick, which is Ocean County down by the shore and we have a decent presence in Essex County as well. A little Hudson [County]. So we’re getting there and we have people in those areas because I totally believe that you want relatable people. People that know the area and live within the area.
Stormy Bell (20:38): Everyone’s reaching their own people, per se. They’re able to relate, they know the school, they know the areas, they know what’s going on. They have a pulse of the community.
Nancy Labov (20:51): Totally. It’s one of the identifying factors. I think it’s really important. We don’t go in and say, “hi, I’m Nancy. I’m an alcoholic.” That’s kind of a very AA type of way of talking. Our members will go in and be like, “hi, I’m Morgan. I’m 25. I’m from River Edge, New Jersey.” That’s how people qualify because it’s not an AA meeting, it’s not an NA meeting, it’s not either of those wonderful self help healing, 12 step recovery organizations. There’s many, we’re not trying to take from that or trying to go against their traditions or anything. This is a different model and it had to be created. As a nurse, I really, really feel that this is a community issue.
The only way we’re gonna reach the community is through connection with each other. We are living in a time where we’re so severely isolated in our own little bunkers, as Brené Brown would say. I love Brené Brown. She says, ’we live in a society where we go into our holes and we’re on our computers. We’re doing Facebook, texting. We’re just not relating so much.’ We really need to give words and language to this, to everybody in our communities. We’re kind of also the event planners of addiction. That’s the third tier of us. We basically create and produce events for towns, county level, city, whatever, and we do that a lot with Dee Gillen [of] The Black Poster Project who is our sister partner. She is one of our members as a parent, but she has created her own 501(c)(3) of these marvelous, hundreds of posters. I know you’ve had her as a guest before.
Stormy Bell (22:59): She has been a guest. Yes. She’s wonderful. Powerful story.
Nancy Labov (23:04): She really is. I don’t know if she sent you pictures. I hope she did.
Stormy Bell (23:08): She did. It’s wonderful. Actually on your website, you have one. I don’t know if it’s your board picture, it’s standing in front of some of those pictures.
Nancy Labov (23:20): Oh yes! Back before the pandemic, we were really doing these community events. We were doing them [at] the same place, same time every quarter so people could kind of get into the flow of seeing that this is a community action issue. We need everybody. Somebody’s gonna donate food, we’re gonna have resources tables, and we’re gonna have speakers because it begins with the language of the heart. If we’re not connecting through our stories, we won’t find that common bond. We won’t change our perceptions. We can. We so can. We can recover our world by working together. There is no doubt in my mind.
Stormy Bell (24:12): Awesome. Now you’ve already shared a couple stories just in our conversation. Do you have another story of impact that you’d like to share?
Nancy Labov (24:21): I would love to share this one. This one was one of the most heartwarming things that had happened. I brought back an alumni to a town to speak at the school to the students and while he was there, he spoke all day. He wanted so much to be able to speak. His name’s Raheem. Raheem was speaking and part of his story was that he never got his diploma because he never turned in his library books. I mean, it’s just part of that alcoholic behavior. You let go of some important things because you just can’t care. Partly probably it’s part being a youth I guess, but anyways he never returned his library books, or textbooks so he never got his diploma. That was his story. At the end of his share, the principal started sharing and he gave him a diploma.
Stormy Bell (25:21): Oh, did he really? Wow.
Nancy Labov (25:24): In front of all the students and that still just gives me chills. Just the healing. It’s about healing. When people come together you just don’t know how far that healing level will take you. It might be good for the members going into share because it just gives us so much back. You can’t keep it unless you give it away. It’s a big quote in 12 step recovery. The fact that the school, some of the staff knew these people pre recovery. It helps on so many levels for people to have these healing, connections and engagements with each other.
Stormy Bell (26:18): Amazing.
Nancy Labov (26:20): Oh, I love that diploma story.
Stormy Bell (26:22): You’re warming my heart just as you speak, I’m just like, wow. Wow.
Nancy Labov (26:27): It’s so important. I really believe this is the one thing we can come together on Stormy. The fact that addiction doesn’t discriminate. It could happen to anybody and it’s the one disease that’s preventable. So it’s something, if we are talking about it we put light on it, cause it would light to fester in the dark and not be talked about, you know? In recovery we talk about it all the time. At least if we could bring it to the forefront and talk about it now and again with people we can connect so much better.
Stormy Bell (27:03): You’re changing perceptions.
Nancy Labov (27:05): I hope so. I mean it does. It is just my goodness. I can be real grand. I have grand ideas. I wrote Oprah the other day and I was like “Oprah, I got a solution here. Okay. Pay attention please. Oprah. I read your book. What? You know what happened to you?” Great book by the way. Oh, all about healing trauma. Yeah.
Stormy Bell (27:33): Oh that’s awesome. Very good.
Nancy Labov (27:36): Yeah.
Stormy Bell (27:37): All right. This is a question I think is fun. I don’t know if my guests think it is.
Nancy Labov (27:42): Okay.
Stormy Bell (27:43): Can you share a blooper? Something that didn’t go right. Then tell me what you learned from it.
Nancy Labov (27:50): Oh my gosh. I bloop every day for crying out loud.
Stormy Bell (27:56): One that stands out more than others.
Nancy Labov (28:02): What stands out more… I’ll tell you what really is important, to learn how to let go and let other people take the reins now and again. Because this is something I created, you know, I think I’m the only one that can do it just right. There’s many people. There is no I in team and I always profess that but if you are creating something and you’re really passionate about it it’s a wonderful thing, but you have to be careful that you’re not burning yourself out. That you’re allowing yourself to have some self care and self time, however that looks outside the organization. I am not the organization, the organization is not me. Big lesson. That’s a big one. That and don’t take yourself so seriously all the time.
Stormy Bell (29:12): That’s awesome. I love it. Yeah. Thank you.
Nancy Labov (29:15): Okay.
Stormy Bell (29:15): All right. We’re almost at the end of our time, I have one more opportunity for you to love on Alumni in Recovery. Just why should people get involved? Why should people come and hear your stories? Just love on your love on what you do?
Nancy Labov (29:34): Oh my gosh, you know, our community events, everything. It’s just such an ability for people to be able to just find a way to relate to each other. We’re back to connections. It’s all about the healing and the connections. I think that if anybody lives in the New Jersey area, I have something I love where the New York state line, where at Tallman Mountain State Park which is on the New York state line on the Hudson River. There’s a pool club there called Tallman Beach and Pool Club. We’re having Recovery Day. Recovery Day is an event that was created by the manager there who’s also in recovery. That was one of those little things that just happened. Like, whoa, well, how’d that happen? It’s gonna be bands. It’s gonna be music, food. The ability to hear good speakers, resources come together, paint rocks which is something that we do you know, have a little healing modalities in the back. You could swim. I mean, this is so many opportunities and that’s September 18th in the middle of National Recovery Month. I’m gonna love on Alumni in Recovery by mention.
Stormy Bell (31:08): Go right ahead.
Nancy Labov (31:09): Go to our website. No, better yet go to Facebook and go to Alumni in Recovery and find out more information about it.
Stormy Bell (31:20): Awesome. We will have that in our show notes so people can be able to find that and more information.
Nancy Labov (31:27): Anybody can get involved. Anybody.
Stormy Bell (31:29): Absolutely. I’m encouraging them to. Awesome. Well, Nancy, thank you for being my guest today. This has been so enlightening, so encouraging and I hope that our listeners find something that they can truly embrace.
Nancy Labov (31:48): Well, thank you very much.
Stormy Bell (31:49): So I do want to thank you.
Nancy Labov (31:50): Okay. It’s been a great time. Maybe one day we’ll run into each other on the highway.
Stormy Bell (31:54): That’d be awesome. Absolutely. I want to thank my listeners. Thank you for joining us today. I hope you got as much out of it as I did. I look forward to seeing you on our next episode of The Art of Volunteering, have a great day.
Show Notes & Links
Alumni in Recovery’s Facebook – www.facebook.com/alumniinrecovery
Alumni in Recovery – www.alumniinrecovery.org
Dee Gillen, The Black Poster Project – www.buzzsprout.com/1961837/11334498
Join the FB Community: bit.ly/3tLaY1B
Join the Mailing List: bit.ly/36VmYUY