Advocacy Leader Questions Candidates at Town Hall Meeting

August has been a successful month for the Recovery Voices Count campaign. Among other things, Recovery Voices Count seeks to bring addiction related issues to the attention of candidates for public office here in New Jersey and around the country by asking them a series of five questions.

On August 4, 2008, Advocacy Leader Carolyn Hadge attended a town hall meeting in Ocean County with U.S. Senate candidate Dick Zimmer and Congressional candidate for New Jersey’s third district, Chris Myers; and again attended a town hall meeting with third district candidate John Adler on August 19. Ms. Hadge was able to ask a question in front of the crowd during the first meeting, comparing spending $40 billon per year on the ‘War on Drugs’ to the savings in Ocean County from “the Ocean County Drug Court and Intensive Supervision Program.” While unable to ask a public question in the Adler town hall, Hadge was able to corral him for a moment afterwards. Adler expressed his support for treatment over the ‘War on Drugs’, as well as having a good understanding and support for enacting parity legislation.

It should be noted that advocacy leaders in and around New Jersey’s two most competitive congressional districts, the 3rd and the 7th, are in the planning stages of holding town hall meetings to brings candidates together to discuss the important issues of the recovery community and to emphasize the growing voice of the recovery community on local, state, and national issues.

For more information, return to the NCADD-NJ Election Guide web page for updated news and events.

Recovery Voices Count

Faces and Voices of Recovery recently launched their Recovery Voices Count campaign to educate the public about the myriad of ways that they can get involved in nonpartisan civic engagement activities so that their voices can be heard in the local, state and national arenas. Recovery community organizations and recovery advocates across the country are conducting voter registration and Get-Out-the-Vote activities, sponsoring candidate forums and getting candidates for political office on record about critical policies that will make recovery a reality for even more Americans.

With that in mind, along with a number of excellent materials, Faces and Voices of Recovery is also hosting one hour phone-in Recovery Advocacy teleconferences. The topic of the first teleconference/webinar in the 2008 series supports the Recovery Voices Count campaign. In this webinar, experts in the field talk about how you can get involved in the Recovery Voices Count campaign. Pat Taylor, Executive Director of Faces and Voices of Recovery introduces the campaign, Tom Coderre, National Field Director of Faces and Voices of Recovery gives an overview of why you should get more civically engaged, Gwen Henderson, Women in New Recovery speaks about voter registration success at her organization, NCADD-NJ’s Lori McDaniel discussed building relationships and the process of educating the public, candidates and elected officials about drug and alcohol addiction issues and sound public policies, and Jeff Blodgett, Wellstone Action spoke about how to organize and mobilize a successful Get-out-the-Vote campaign.

Take a look at the informative materials
Download the Guide to Civic Engagement
Listen to the teleconference
Download the Recovery Voices Count PowerPoint presentation
Find out more about the Campaign
Go to NCADD-NJ's Election Guide