We can think about the people in recovery like individual trees in a forest. A forest is not just a group of individual trees; they are interconnected in what has been termed the “wood wide web.” All the trees, plants and microbial organisms in a forest are in reality connected to each other. The wood wide web here is a metaphor for the larger community and the role of CHIME in the restoration of social connection through the development of recovery capital in all of its forms. People recover in communities and then in turn help sustain those communities thrive through shoots of new growth from which even more sprouts of recovery can spread through the environment and form a web of connectivity.
What this article does is to describe the background to CHIME and then discuss how it can be reconciled with a recovery capital model for generating recovery not only across individuals but across neighbourhoods and communities. What we are articulating here is that recovery is transmissible at the community level, a facet long known in indigenous recovery communities but not something that has been well articulated in conceptual models
So what is CHIME?
There is a secret sauce to building and supporting recovery, and we see that as the concept of CHIME, so widely cited and discussed in the area of addiction recovery as it is evidence of shared learning and evidence between the addiction and mental health recovery research areas. Recovery on a foundational level involves renewing self-identity and shifting from being an outsider to an insider within the broader community.
In 2011, Leamy and colleagues published a systematic review based on 87 journal papers which yielded 13 characteristics of the recovery journey and five ‘recovery processes’ that make up the acronym CHIME:
- Connectedness
- Hope
- Identity
- Meaning
- Empowerment
The article also identified recovery stage descriptions. But for now the focus will be on the five recovery processes that make up CHIME. Of the 87 studies:
- 86% identified connectedness (most commonly ‘support from others’ (61%), ‘peer support and support groups’ (45%) and ‘being part of the community’ (40%)
- 79% identified hope and optimism about the future (most commonly ‘belief in possibility of recovery’ (34%), ‘motivation to change’ (17%) and ‘hope-inspiring relationships’ (14%)
- 75% identified identify (most commonly ‘rebuilding a positive sense of identity’ (66%) and ‘overcoming stigma’ (44%)
- 66% identified meaning in life (most commonly ‘quality of life’ (65%), ‘meaningful life and social roles’ (46%) and ‘spirituality’ (41%)
- 91% identified empowerment (most commonly ‘personal responsibility’ (91%) and ‘control over life’ (90%)
The authors conclude by saying that “recovery processes can be understood as measurable dimensions of change, which typically occur during recovery and provide a taxonomy of recovery outcomes”.
What this article will do is to attempt to reconcile this model with the recovery capital framework also widely deployed to measure and map recovery journeys and to suggest a model for CHIME based on the community conditions in which recovery takes place. To illuminate the connected forest of the wood wide web in the form of recovery community, and the Inclusive Recovery Cities model is also about connecting those vibrant forests to replenish the earth and have linked and connected forests throughout each region where recovery emerges.
Recovery Capital and CHIME
The current state of the evidence around recovery capital is summarised in “The Handbook of Recovery Capital” (Best and Hennessy, 2025) where there is a growing recognition of the benefits of a strengths-based approach to both measuring the recovery resources a person has accrued and characterising the recovery journey as a process of building recovery capital.
Our own model (eg Best and Laudet, 2010) has characterised recovery capital in three broad domains:
- Personal social capital (the internal skills, resources and capabilities available to a person)
- Social recovery capital (the resources drawn through people and groups who can support the recovery journey)
- Community recovery capital (the assets and resources in the community that can be accessed such as housing, employment opportunities, community groups and activities)
What is apparent is that there is a clear overlap between this taxonomy of resources and the processes outlined in the CHIME acronym. The clearest mapping is between social recovery capital and connections although this is not straightforward as ‘being a part of the community’ is classed under connections in the CHIME model. Hope, Identity and Empowerment are clearly linked to Personal Recovery Capital, while Meaning will also sit primarily in the personal domain with domains such as quality of life and spirituality but meaningful social roles has both a social and, potentially, a community component to it.
Nonetheless, the CHIME model is primarily focused around personal and social components of recovery with a relatively limited incorporation of the role of the community and it is here that the tri-partite approach to recovery capital may offer a model of how CHIME can be applied in practice to addiction recovery. But to get there requires a brief diversion to the logic behind the Inclusive Recovery Cities approach (Best and Colman, 2018).
Inclusive Recovery Cities and the Outside In model
The Inclusive Recovery Cities model is predicated on the idea that recovery is a form of social contagion that spreads in communities where it is visible, accessible and attractive. For that reason, the model requires participating cities to host at least four public-facing events to encourage active citizenship and community engagement by people in recovery and their families to challenge stigma and exclusion and to benefit the whole community through increased social and community cohesion. To effectively foster recovery community capital, members of the recovery community participate in meaningful ways in the planning and facilitation of these public facing events. The assumption underpinning this is that recovery will most commonly take place as an ‘outside in’ experience (Best et al, submitted) where people with low recovery capital engage in community resources and activities that provide access to new social networks and opportunities that create the conditions for building the internal resources (motivation, resilience, quality of life) and the practical resources (jobs, houses, transport and money) that will sustain and nurture the recovery journey. However, the model is also about the connections and shared learnings between cities – based on exactly the same principles of sharing and nurturing – to create a network of linked inclusive recovery cities that are mutually generative and empowering.
So why C-CHIME?
- To assert the critical role of the community for good (where there is equitable access to visible and attractive recovery resources) or ill (where there are social and structural barriers to people in recovery getting jobs, houses and other community resources)
- To reconcile the recovery capital and CHIME models, where C-CHIME is considered as a dynamic loop but essentially one that is typically initiated in the following manner:
The model essentially reconciles the Recovery Capital and CHIME approaches by introducing an over-arching community component that generates the conditions for positive human connection that in turn inspires the hope and belief that change is possible (through the process of social contagion and exposure to attractive (peer) role models) which inspires meaningful activities, which in turn creates the personal conditions to support a sense of empowerment and positive identity and in turn the development of a mutual identity, commitment to a broader social contract and shared purpose that can have powerful prosocial implications.
Within this model of C-CHIME, recovery capital is both a candidate metric for assessing progression but also an organising framework for building interventions to support this growth process.
There is a trend across westernized societies in increased social isolation and lower rates of social capital. Social capital has been found to be associated with increased levels of trust, and civic engagement within a community or region, with significant benefits. There is indication that higher levels of social capital may be associated with increased employee, engagement, improved team performance, greater innovation, enhanced knowledge sharing, and even improved health outcomes. Given the decay of community across westernized societies, we believe there is value in focusing on the development of recovery community capital for several reasons, to include the benefit it has to the development of broader community cohesion. Recovery community typically transcends subgroups and political affiliations in addressing broad social isolation challenges and so can support the re-seeding of social capital in communities in which there has been an erosion of these connections.
As an example of what value this can offer, the UK 2015 Life in Recovery survey measured people in recovery and the general public identified some of the significant benefits in respect to community and civic engagement. In their survey of over 800 participants, 79.4% reported volunteering in community or civic groups in recovery. In contrast, only 42% of the general public engages in these same activities. Communities with high levels of community and civic participation which are elements of what are known as social capital tend to have lower crime, higher employment, better overall health than communities with lower rates of social capital. What the combination of these factors suggest is that communities with more people in recovery are the kinds of communities we all want to live in. Strengthening recovery community is foundational to the health and welfare of the larger society.”
Stronger, more connected communities are healthier and more pleasing places to live they are vital in the broadest sense possible. Recovery community is a vital element of the larger community. Through efforts to build, measure and understand recovery community capital we believe that there are vital resources in efforts to create a cascade of recovery transmission across whole communities. People recovery in community which is the cornerstone of healthy societies. Focus on expanding recovery has most often been akin to planting and nurturing individual trees. It is time to consider the whole forest in order to realize the full benefit of recovery community through the Inclusive Recovery City model.
References
Best, D., Albertson, K., Irving, J., Lightowlers, C., Mama-Rudd, A., & Chaggar, A. (2015). The UK life in recovery survey 2015: The first national UK survey of addiction recovery experiences. https://shura.shu.ac.uk/12200/1/FINAL%20UK%20Life%20in%20Recovery%20Survey%202015%20report.pdf
Best, D. & Hennessy, E. (2025) The Handbook of Recovery Capital, Bristol University Press: Bristol, UK.
Best, D. & Laudet, A. (2010) The potential of recovery capital. Royal Society for the Arts. RSA: London, UK.
Best, D., Duffy, S., Smith, D., Bryson, J., Brown, E. & White, W. An “Outside In” model of recovery capital growth: Building personal and social recovery capital from community resources, Addiction Research and Theory (submitted)
Leamy, M., Bird, V., Le Bouteiller, C., Williams, J. & Slade, M. (2011) Conceptual framework for personal recovery in mental health: systematic review and narrative synthesis, British Journal of Psychiatry, 199, 445-452.
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