1. Grow and strengthen our volunteer base:
SMART Recovery USA reaches our community through our volunteer-led meetings. Our public meetings are free and open to anyone who wants to attend. By training our volunteers in the science of recovery and meeting facilitation, we can offer consistently effective, welcoming, stigma-free meetings no matter where or how people attend them. We are committed to recruiting, training, and supporting our volunteers to run effective meetings, energize our community, and maintain their enthusiasm and dedication to making a difference.
By expanding and evolving our recruiting and training options, we empower our volunteers to make long-lasting differences in the lives of everyone who attends our meetings.
2. Develop our organizational culture, structure, and leadership:
As we empower our participants to transform their lives, we have not overlooked the opportunity to do the same for ourselves as an organization. Our rapid growth in recent years has brought us to a tipping point. Here we find it imperative to reevaluate our culture, structure, and leadership to ensure we are properly aligned for growth while maintaining the integrity of our community values. With this comes the need to secure and bolster our team of employees and volunteers who can better support our growing recovery community. It comes with the responsibility to ensure we are an increasingly diverse, inclusive, and equitable organization, better reflecting the populations we serve. And, it includes the need to improve our technology to more effectively meet the needs of our staff, volunteers and larger SMART Recovery community.
3. Strengthen our financial resources:
As with any organization, our ability to support our goals depends on our ability to fund them. We provide open, public SMART Recovery meetings for no charge to anyone who chooses to attend. In addition, we offer extensive training for our volunteers and others who want to learn how SMART works. Finally, we are consistently updating our instructional materials to reflect the current state of the science and experience of recovery. We must therefore work to ensure our financial future.
While many of our revenue streams are self-sustaining, there is so much more we can do with an increased budget. We must seek funding from grassroots groups, grants, and major giving from individuals and foundations. We must also create a plan to increase donor opportunities and a fund-development culture within our organization and our community.
SMART Recovery USA is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, with a platinum rating from the GuideStar® Directory of Charities and Nonprofit Organizations. While our mutual-support groups are provided free to all participants, they are not free to operate. This places a significant financial burden of providing SMART meetings, training facilitators, providing recovery handbooks and facilitator manuals in multiple languages and offering in-person, phone, and online meetings. We also incur expenses simply operating the day-to-day functions of a nationwide organization staffed with professionals who support more than two thousand volunteers.
4. Raise awareness, use, and support for SMART Recovery USA:
SMART Recovery’s meetings and tools are effective only when they are available to those who need them. We will reach our goals only through continued outreach to our community, the general public, government, and healthcare providers. The more people who know about, use, and support SMART, the more people can find relief and empower themselves to lead more fulfilling lives.