Can you tell us the name of your group, when and where it meets and the format? The name of our group is Recovery in NA, we meet Sundays at 12 noon at 603 Kearny Ave in Kearny NS and the format is an open speaker topic discussion meeting except the first Sunday of the month when a speaker will share their experience strength and hope.
When is your Group Anniversary? May 1995, this past May the group celebrated 30 years of carrying the message.
How many homegroup members do you have? We have about 5 active homegroup members that attend every week.
Describe your group name and how it relates to the recovery process. Our name Recovery in NA originally meant Recovery in North Arlington, when the meeting was held there many years ago. Since it moved to Kearny Recovery in NA now means recovery in unity with other members of Narcotics Anonymous. Our smaller intimate meetings provide an atmosphere of unity all our group members share. When one member celebrates we all celebrate. We can not recover alone.
What can someone expect when attending the meeting for the first time? You can expect to be welcomed into a room full of love compassion and empathy. Our group members share a close bond and are all very welcoming towards new faces. We are a very diverse group with members of all varying ages, backgrounds, and lengths of clean time.
What makes this meeting special to your group members? The atmosphere of recovery goes well beyond the meeting space. After the meeting every Sunday most group members go out to lunch. The group members have become more like family as we all share meals and participate in events together outside the meeting space. Our group also puts on a Holiday Pot Luck every year in December that all the group members enjoy and look forward to as well as our own group celebration in May.
Can you share any stories or fun facts about the group? Since the pandemic we no longer meet at the Tot Spot and the group looks completely different today prior to the pandemic. Many new faces attend the meeting every week from other areas that make the group what it is today. Among those new faces is a young woman who came in one Sunday who like many of us when we were new was afraid of her own shadow and too nervous to read Who’s An Addict. However she kept coming. Since then she not only found the courage to read a suggested reading out loud but that snowballed into taking the chairperson commitment where she brought fantastic speakers for 6 months, she celebrated 1 year clean, and today she is our newly elected GSR.