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- The Second Road - an online support community for those in recovery from addiction
The Second Road - an online support community for those in recovery from addiction
Voting Summary (Elevator Pitch):
Substance abuse in our country is destroying families and taking lives. The Second Road is an online support community that encourages millions of recovering addicts to stay clean through the use of customizable tools and support from peers.
Supporting organization:
The Second Road, Inc.
URL:
http://www.thesecondroad.org
City:
Ivy
State/Region:
VA
Country:
USA
Project Vision Statement & Potential Social Impact:
TheSecondRoad.org is an online platform for those in recovery from addictions to stay on the road of recovery and help one another along the way. Its goal is to encourage people in all stages of recovery and families afflicted by addiction to find others with whom they can relate, share stories, build community, and empower members to reach life-changing goals--large and small--24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
An estimated 23.2 million persons aged 12 or older are classified with substance dependence or abuse. When faced with the uphill battle of getting and staying clean (environmental triggers, job loss, ruined relationships, the need to find new social networks that don't encourage drug use, learning life skills to become productive), the outlook for recovery looks bleak. The fact is, relapse rates are high and recovering addicts must orient their lives to work with their affliction on a daily, sometimes hourly basis. The tens of millions of Americans in recovery are faced with a dearth of services to help them cope with stressful triggers and manage their lives, while remaining in recovery.
Studies show that by sharing their stories, creating trusted peer support groups, and learning the vital practical and emotional skills necessary to live life with health and balance, recovering addicts face much better odds at achieving long-term recovery. We believe we have developed a life-long service, the effects of which will create valued members of society, productive workers, and healthier family environments, and save billions of dollars of annual health-care expenses and tens of thousands of lives.
Some of our unique features include:
• Proprietary ‘crisis button’
• video recovery stories and mini-documentaries
• pages to upload supportive materials
• evocative posting areas, including a memorial wall
• chat sessions with experts and advocates
• reviews/comments on addiction/recovery-related media and books, featured artists/performers, and humor
Sustainability (financial) model:
The Second Road's reliance on community members for content, scalable technology, and low employee/member ratio will create a corporate structure more like an Internet company than a traditional non-profit. TSR believes this radical departure from the traditional model will enable the organization to reach many-fold more of those in need, while keeping costs to a bare minimum.
In terms of revenue, informal research has shown that Alcoholics Anonymous and other 12-Step programs are completely member-funded through meeting donations. Though large-scale studies of AA haven't been done, in discussions with attending members, 60% members give, on average, $50 annually. We believe this supports our view that members of The Second Road will be able to fund a significant portion of our operating budget.
With this in mind, we feel confident that the organization can achieve sustainability as of mid-2008 through online donations, revenue from corporate "sponsors" who are interested in reaching our audience, foundation grants, and major gifts.
Potential obstacles:
The Second Road understands that our organizational model is untried and risky. The potential challenges include creating an unproven and complex online service, marketing the service to a socio-economically and culturally diverse audience, gaining donations for a new venture without a proven track record, scaling technology to deal with inevitable breakdowns and site-performance issues without angering the audience, monitoring and reporting whether the site is being used for successful recovery, and meeting the needs of an at times contentious user base. We feel, however, that the downside risk is astronomically outweighed by the potential good the organization can do, and secondly, that many of these risks can be mitigated by operating the organization with these risks in mind.
Resource Needs:
The Second Road is currently funded through a few major donors, including the executive director’s house, and is awaiting funding through two government grants. In order to implement the “beta” and full versions of the site by June, we will need to fundraise to create and market our online service, support required bandwidth and servers, and pay key staffers in the creation of our entity.
Key Milestones:
In the next 90 days, The Second Road will launch the beta site to be vetted and hammered on by a select diverse national user base, work on site development with a group of recovering addicts, aim to raise a minimum of $155,000 and hold the first meeting of the Board of Directors in Washington, DC.
Project Summary:
The Second Road (www.thesecondroad.org) is an online support community for the millions of recovering drug and alcohol addicts in the United States (and eventually the world). The site will encourage people with substance abuse disorders to manage their lives with customizable tools and support from peers and will also help family and friends learn about addiction from experts in the field as well as the whole recovery community.
Comments
Addiction recovery is a
Addiction recovery is a difficult step for those who want to heal, it take courage to make the right decision. Why courage? Because a drug addict can't think straight, his mind is misguided by drugs, sometimes they can feel threatened by drug rehab. Things shouldn't't be like this at all, that's why I am glad to read about this online support, it's most welcomed.
I have a question. Don't you
I have a question. Don't you need any publicity made to your site. I see it isn't ranked until now .. If you want your rank to grow don't hesitate to contact me. I know a very good company which does things like that. You'll be very pleased.
Best regards,
Andreea
great idea
Wow, great idea. I think this site will fill a huge gap in the online world for recovering addicts. From what I've seen, there's absolutely nothing useful out there right now beyond your basic message board. Brav-0, I think this is going to help lots of people -- best of luck, GH
The second rd
I am very excited that this site will be helping so many people in various forms of recovery. There is a desperate need of resources for people in need of recovery. Isolation is a huge defect of those facing these issues, and to have an outlet online is invaluable because they will always have the choice to go online lookng for healthy tools as opposed to sitting online just feeding the isolation or any addiction. As one of the participants I was touched while doing my interview as to how many people this will affect in a positive way! There were women there with eating disoreders, men with health issues, gay ,straight, young and old.It really covers a wide spectrum of people and issues!!! This site is going to grow and help so many,I am grateful and proud to have been a part of it.
The Second Road
Billy,
Thank you for your feedback. We are grateful for your willingness to be filmed. We feel confident that this website will greatly impact the lives of so many people in recovery all around the world. Keep watching the site as well roll out new features.
The Road Crew