Building Recovery Capital: The Role of Cooperative Behavior in a Community Support Institution

Abstract

Contemporary scholars and addiction professionals agree that person- and community-centered approaches to recovery from substance misuse are most effective in establishing sustainable change. Recovery Capital is one concept that helps us understand the conglomeration of individual, family, and community resources that contribute to a person’s successful path toward recovery. The purpose of this study is to understand how the Friendship Cafe functions as a community support institution for recovery. More specifically, it focuses on one essential aspect of a recovering individual’s social reintegration process: the need to become cooperative members of a community (Best and Laudet, 2010). This study considers if cooperative behavior is intentionally promoted within the Friendship Cafe, and what it looks like in this setting. More specifically, this paper seeks to understand how rules and norms of cooperation were communicated through the Cafe’s formal structures and activities and informal interactions among members and staff. During a three month ethnographic study, I conducted observations and volunteered at a unique community support institution to learn more about cooperative behaviors within this community. My findings determined that acts of cooperation are manifested and enforced both by formal structures, informed by the formal and physical framework of the community support institution; and by informal interactions between community members, relying on modeling, prosocial acts of enforcement, and verbal acts of enforcement, to promote and perpetuate a culture of cooperation within this recovery community.