Building the First Inclusive Recovery Community in the Nation with Ashley Neal

This episode is about how a tri-county partnership in Tampa Bay became the first inclusive recovery community in the nation.

Ashley Neal, a recovery advocate and community organizer who helped build the Inclusive Recovery Community Tampa Bay (IRCTB), walks through the whole arc: getting county governments to sign on, recruiting treatment centers and recovery organizations under one shared umbrella, and building a public events calendar that makes recovery visible instead of scattered.

Ashley has spent more than 20 years in recovery herself, and she's spent the last decade turning that experience into systems-level work across Hillsborough, Pinellas, and Pasco Counties. Her story includes real setbacks (a hurricane that derailed the original plan, months of waiting on one county's buy-in) and the specific moves that finally broke things loose.

Listen for what an inclusive recovery community actually is (hint: not a program), how to get three different county governments to a yes, and why a shared calendar of recovery events matters more than it sounds like it should.

In This Episode

• Ashley's own 20-plus year recovery story, told with striking honesty about the years before she got help
• What an "inclusive recovery community" is and isn't, in plain language
• How Hurricane Helene derailed the original plan, and how the tri-county model came together instead
• The exact move that finally got Pinellas County to say yes after months of waiting
• Why IRCTB's public events calendar and window-cling awareness campaign are doing more work than they look like they are

Links

• https://irctampabay.com/
• https://www.dfaf.org
• https://whenyouknow.org/