Townsand Price-Spratlen - Addiction Recovery and Resilience

Addiction Recovery and Resilience

SUNY series in African American Studies

John R. Howard and Robert C. Smith, editors

Addiction Recovery and Resilience

FAITH-BASED HEALTH SERVICES
IN AN AFRICAN AMERICAN COMMUNITY

TOWNSAND PRICE-SPRATLEN

Published by State University of New York Press, Albany

2022 State University of New York

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY

www.sunypress.edu

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Name: Price-Spratlen, Townsand, author.

Title: Addiction recovery and resilience : faith-based health services in an African American community / Townsand Price-Spratlen.

Description: Albany : State University of New York Press, [2022] | Series: SUNY series in African American studies | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021021931 | ISBN 9781438487373 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781438487397 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Church and substance abuseUnited StatesCase studies. | Faith-based human servicesUnited StatesCase studies. | Substance abuseTreatmentReligious aspectsChristianityCase studies. | Medical careReligious aspectsChristianityCase studies. | African AmericansSubstance useCase studies. | African AmericansMedical careCase studies. | Community-based social servicesUnited StatesCase studies.

Classification: LCC BV4460.3 .P75 2022 | DDC 261.8/3229dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021021931

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To my father,
Professor Emeritus Thaddeus H. Spratlen (19302021)

Your humanity, discipline, and humble brilliance are among your many characteristics that I adore. Each day, you shared all of them with such unyielding empathy and a life mission for justice. Thank you, Dad, for your love and respect, your thoughtful craft of care, and willingness to listen and inspire over the years. I am so grateful that you are my father.

PART 1
HOPE: RESILIENT PEOPLE, PLACES, AND THINGS

PART 2
HURT: DISSONANT DIALOGUES OF RESILIENCE

PART 3
HALLELUJAH! HOW HEALING HAPPENS

Though sole-authored, this book is a product of the contributions of many. Thank you first to the Criminal Justice Research Center (CJRC) at Ohio State University, under the leadership of Professor Dana Haynie. The 2014 CJRC seed grant allowed me to hire a graduate research assistant to help with the interviews and early data analyses, to compensate research participants, and to participate in other actions related to the organization under study. Thank you to Yolanda Gelo for your conscientious efforts as the project research assistant.

I can only begin to express my appreciation for Professor Emeritus Ruth D. Peterson, who was the leadership whisperer and whose advocacy was vital to the funding of this Ministries project. More vitally, you are the reason I am alive and sane. From your rescue of me after my car accident at the Ohio-Michigan border in the summer of 2003, to your CJRC seed grant for the Reconstruction, Inc., project that became my first book, to your incomparable friendship and quiet counsel on so many other occasions they could fill a book on their own, I thank you.

Professor Lauren J. Krivo, you have shared so much of your time and skills and commitment with me over the years. Hearing of your retirement this year gives rise to a melancholy feeling, since far fewer sociologists will now benefit from your many gifts. I am grateful to be one among those who have. Thanks also to Professor Bob Crutchfield, whose advocacy allowed my sociological journey to begin, to Professor Barry Lee for your guidance during my postdoc fellowship, and to Professor Avery M. Pete Guest. It was an honor to be your teaching assistant for sociological methods for those two essential quarters of my growth in grad school. And thank you for chairing my dissertation project and for all of your guidance in helping to make a Husky sociologist out of me. I share a special thanks to Dean Linda M. Burton, for your mentoring over the years, for your conscientious work toward economic equity with the many families and communities you have researched and worked with, and for your lessons of resilience and life renewal that I value so much. In this book, and in all my work, my social science approach extends from the foundation Dr. W. E. B. Du Bois established, to which I and many others strive to respectfully make contributions.

Thank you to my family. Mom, Dr. Lois Price Spratlen, from your bread-making, singing Thadd and me to sleep at night, and loving punishments from my childhood, to your professional excellence and pride in being a Black nurse and multiple organization endowment builder, these are among the ways in which your voice and life continue to resonate so strongly in my everyday these years after your passing in 2013. Dad, the book is dedicated to you, which is only the most partial reciprocity for all of the love and Spirit you continue to share with me and so many others. Pamela L. Spratlen, your ambassador achievements, sense of adventure, cultural curiosities, and diplomatic diversities here in the US and abroad, continue to amaze. Pat Spratlen Etem, your Olympic achievements, the family you have built, and your public health professionalism are incredible and a joy to see, feel, and adore. Paula Spratlen Mitchell, your faith-driven life, state-title-winning athletic coaching, and devotion to be a high-quality educator in settings where folk are leading hardscrabble lives is so much more than inspiration alone. Khalfani Mwamba, your name change, culturalist, Pan-African worldview and consistencies, and family and nation building since you were a teenager have been powerful to experience and share in along the way.

Thank you to Eric H. for your consistency and unyielding dedication to your mobile ministry for those years and for believing so deeply in the possibilities of what the Ministries could have been. To Pastor Orinda Hawkins-Brinkley, I am so glad your principled pastoral leadership guided a church neighbor of the Ministries for those critical years. William Goldsby, thank you for your friendship. You caringly facilitated many meetings that thankfully were much more consistent with the protocol of Reconstruction, Inc., than 12 Step meetings or the Ministries. When things were most complicated, you helped Eric H. and me process what good servant-leadership is and how to manage situations when its demands are not met.

Thank you to Pastor Ellwyn Marshall (pseudonym) for making the Ministries available to explore and explain. Your cofounding of the organization that would become the Ministries contributed to the health of so many, in a neighborhood in desperate need of those willing to address their own healing as they assisted with the healing of many others. Thanks to the hundreds of people who affiliated with the Ministries over the fourteen years of the project, for one event of a single day or for many events and years of Ministries progress. I especially thank those who responded to their active addiction, grew their own sober lives, and, by doing so, enriched the lives of their loved ones, other affiliates of the Ministries, and the health of North Lawson (pseudonym) and the larger community. Those who came to Sunday evening worship and who volunteered their time and energy to allow the Tuesday and Thursday community lunches to flourish were central to helping the Ministries be a social ecology of worth and mission. I am particularly grateful to the members of the local chapter of Cocaine Anonymous (CA) who frequented the Either-Or meetings on Thursday nights and Saturday mornings. Anonymity demands prevent me from being able to name members of the critical mass of each meeting. Your actions and principled decisions are presented in the book, and, where most relevant, your experiences are presented by pseudonym. Thank you for the many ways you gave Either-Or meetings so much life by sharing so much of your own.