‘Recovery is real’: Georgia Recovers Bus Tour rolls into Rome Sept. 5

Rome will soon play host to a statewide bus tour and a celebration aimed at saving lives and raising awareness.

The Georgia Recovers Bus Tour will roll into Heritage Park the evening of Thursday, Sept. 5, for live music, free food, speakers, facing painting, a bounce house and resources for those who want to know more about substance abuse recovery.

Local nonprofit Living Proof Recovery will host the event in recognition of September as National Alcohol and Drug Addiction Recovery Month, and it’s free for the community. Rome is just one of the tour’s 63 stops across the state over 31 days, explained Jeff Breedlove, chief strategist for the Georgia Council for Recovery. Funded by the Georgia Department of Behavioral Health and Developmental Disabilities, the tour will include policy stops, which Breedlove described as roundtable discussions, proclamation stops where local officials discuss publicly the importance of Recovery Month, and celebration stops like the one in Rome.

“The whole point — the goal of this — is to do two things at one time: to simultaneously break down the stigma surrounding our disease and show people in Georgia that, in fact, recovery is real,” explained Breedlove, who said he is, himself, living in long-term recovery.

What is Living Proof?

Living Proof, explained Executive Director Brittney Galvanauskas, serves Floyd County and takes referrals from beyond, offering peer support services to people in any phase of their journey of recovery from substance use.

“We’re all people living in recovery, and we just use our lived experience to kind of walk with them through their journey,” she said.

That walk includes a multiple-pathway approach to recovery, with options for peer coaching sessions, art, music, meditation and recreation. Living Proof also hosts several types of support groups, alongside community training events and advocacy for those in recovery.

“We have a recovery residence for women. We have a partnership with the Department of Public Health. They send us maps of where suspected overdoses have happened in our community, and we go door to door and just offer resources in that way. We do anything and everything that we possibly can to support people staying alive and getting well,” Galvanauskas said.

Living Proof is among a few dozen other RCOs in the state, Galvanauskas said. RCOs function with the support of the Georgia Council for Recovery, and they are each nonprofit entities under local leadership, according to https://gc4recovery.org/. The organizations, Breedlove said, exist as a network, but they each look different, and that’s intentional so that RCOs can “look like their communities.”

RCOs, as their own legal entities, are “part of a family of 44, which builds on the strength of each other across the state,” he said. “It’s a very special thing going on in Georgia.”

‘Eliminate the whisper’

Heading into September, the GCR team has visited all tour stops in advance, Breedlove said, to make sure the bus can maneuver. The tour kicks off Aug. 31 in Gainesville on International Overdose Awareness Day as a time to remember those lost to the disease and the families struggling with that loss. With an event like the bus tour, it’s important for the public to remember how pervasive addiction is, Breedlove said.

“Addiction is very real,” he said. “But recovery is real, too, and we need everybody in Floyd to come together and say, ‘Enough funerals.’ Eliminate the whisper, and let’s proudly proclaim that recovery is real and we’re going to come out and find out what Living Proof does in our community and find out how we support Living Proof locally with our charitable giving, with our volunteer hour time. And how do we lift Living Proof up so they can save our friends and neighbors?”

The missions of the tour and of Living Proof as an RCO, he said, are the same.

“Living Proof does one thing. They save lives, they restore families and they strengthen the community of Rome and Floyd County,” he said. “That’s what this bus tour is doing.”