Leona Batten, a women’s addiction recovery program volunteer, recalls the moment she fell off the wagon.
“I think I really was craving a Snickers chocolate bar,” she says.
She was trying to give up sugary foods for a month.
“I couldn’t even give up sugar for a month, let alone if I had to kick a drug habit or something like that,” she says.
Batten was participating in Victory Over Vice, the annual fundraiser she helps organize for the Vesta Recovery Program for Women, a three-month residential treatment program for women with drug and alcohol addictions.
Victory Over Vice asks people to collect pledges in exchange for giving up a bad habit during the month of May. The vice can be anything from junk food, to TV, to Facebook.
The point is to help people appreciate just how hard people with addictions work to become clean and sober, says the recovery program’s executive director, Jackie Lloyd-Rai.
“People with addictions are really not much different from other people with bad habits,” Lloyd-Rai says. “They just lose control of them.”
This year, the fundraiser’s goal is set at $10,000.
The program gets provincial funding, but must fundraise to cover extras.
Vesta is housed in a grand four-storey home on James Street. It combines a daily schedule of chores, classes and therapy groups.
Last year, Lloyd-Rai says she took the modest $1,000 proceeds from the first, tentative edition of Victory Over Vice and used them to establish the Tree House project.
The project helps graduates of Vesta ease back into society without being tempted to abuse substances again.
Vesta leases the three-bedroom Tree House home and rents its rooms back to former clients at rates they can afford. The residents then support each other through the early days of their sobriety.
“A lot of the time you need to be in a good environment longer than long-term treatment even offers,” says Heather, a Tree House resident who asked that her last name not be published.
Heather has completed the Vesta program four times, but relapsed after the first three.
This time, she says, 18 months at Tree House have prepared her to move on with her life.
“I’m a nurse now. I finished school,” she says. “I’m actually a functioning member of society.”
If Vesta makes its $10,000 target this year, Lloyd-Rai says she would use some of the money to open a second two-bedroom Tree House that women like Heather can graduate into as they prepare for living alone.
But she concedes that asking people to give up bad habits may not be the quickest way to raise cash.
“Oh, a lot of people failed at it,” she says.
“How do you capitalize on the failures? . . . We haven’t gotten that ironed out yet.”