By Thea Jarvis

Community Health and Recovery Team (CHART) training will again be available to archdiocesan parishes beginning March 5 at Holy Family Church in Marietta.

During the training, which involves 10 weekly two-and-a-half hour sessions, Substance Abuse Prevention Services of Catholic Social Services will offer parish volunteers positive ways to deal with the disease of addiction.

CHART teaches balanced components of recovery and prevention and shows how parishes can function as information and referral avenues for dependency diseases like substance abuse, food and emotional disorders, and the chronic high stress that sometimes leads to such disease.

The training also helps teams act as educational resources for other parish ministries and indicates possibilities for collaboration in scheduling activities that help congregations avoid addiction and stress.

A parish must have a minimum of four volunteers to qualify for the program. Cost of the training is $20 per person.

In its emphasis on recovery and prevention, “CHART takes an upstream-downstream approach,” said Barbara Bush, originator of CHART and a member of St. Jude’s Church in Atlanta who trains parish teams. “You can’t forsake one for the other.”

Although 12-Step programs abound for people in recovery from addiction, she said, the prevention of such addiction is sometimes given little attention.

Ms. Bush, coordinator of Prevention Services, earned a graduate degree in pastoral service with a specialty in community health and development from Loyola University’s Institute for Ministry. Her focused study was in addictive and dependency disease prevention.

CHART shows how a parish team can make referrals to 12-Step programs and treatment centers while at the same time offer education and information that is integral to addiction prevention.

During training, volunteers are led through presentations and exercises that promote healthy behavior, thus becoming ready to promote such behavior in others, Ms. Bush said.

“When a team is doing what it’s supposed to be doing, it attracts others,” she said. Outreach is effective because of the personal growth of individual team members. People begin to ask, “What’s this glowing in the dark?”

Team members learn together, Ms. Bush said. “There are no ‘experts’ on the team.” If parish staff, clergy or professionals participate, they assume beginner status with everyone else.

Prevention Services began parish training over three years ago when Catholic Social Services sought ways to implement a ministry to people affected by addiction. The CHART method evolved, Ms. Bush said, because she couldn’t find an existing model that was useful and effective in a parish setting. She didn’t set out to develop a program or write a text to accompany the training, she said, but it became necessary because available models were short-sighted.

“The United States has problem-solving as our paradigm for living,” said Ms. Bush. In CHART training, she explained, “We’re calling ourselves to the paradigm creators who can shape the future, not just tackle problems as they present themselves.”

Weekly sessions cover communication, dependency disease, family interaction, substance abuse and stress, intervention, prevention, recovery, health care and community interface.

Few are unaffected by substance abuse, addiction or the stresses modern life imposes, Ms. Bush said. “This is a big ministry, which is why it needs to be a team approach,” she pointed out.

Currently, nine Catholic parishes in the archdiocese have taken part in team training. Episcopal, Lutheran, Presbyterian and Methodist congregations have also sent teams to be trained.

Typically, those who take part in the training have been personally touched by dependency disease or are young parents seeking an “anti-toxic environment” for their children, said Ms. Bush.

The beauty of the training, she said, is that it is meant to be modified – expanded, stretched, narrowed or changed to fit individual parish settings. Teams are mandated to learn parish demographics and concerns of parishioners. Ms. Bush then helps teams structure their outreach to meet real needs.

Present parish efforts include phone referral services, parenting courses, youth education, adult enrichment and informational meetings that address dependency issues.

Teams are told to “lose all sense of ownership,” Ms. Bush said, or risk the program’s grass-roots appeal.

CHART, she said, is peer ministry in which people help themselves and help others, in which wellness is talked about as much as illness, in which “life is a great adventure.”

“What we image, what we visualize, we do,” she believes.

To register for CHART training, or to learn more about CHART, contact Barbara Bush at 881-6571 or 394-2057.