Our Recovery: Building Inclusive and Accountable Recovery Communities

July 06, 2026

Our Recovery is a public-facing initiative that brings together Women of Color and allies to explore how systemic oppression shapes experiences of trauma, belonging, communication, healing, and recovery.

Created by Codi Renee Blackmon, PhD, Our Recovery grows from the intersection of rhetorical scholarship, recovery leadership, community education, and research on racial dynamics within online recovery spaces. The project translates academic research into accessible public conversations and resources while also recognizing community members’ lived experiences as forms of knowledge that can shape how we understand recovery and build more inclusive spaces.

Our Recovery challenges approaches to recovery that treat healing as separate from social and cultural conditions. Programming invites participants to consider how racism, sexism, ableism, classism, homophobia, gender bias, ageism, and other forms of systemic oppression can affect access to support, experiences of belonging, communication practices, and possibilities for healing. Rather than prescribing a single pathway to recovery, the initiative makes room for multiple recovery identities, experiences, and practices.

The project includes a public website, community programming, facilitated discussions, educational resources, and opportunities for Women of Color and allies to learn and reflect together. Its work emphasizes support, accountability, boundaries, rest, community, and developing practices that make recovery spaces more responsive to people whose experiences have often been marginalized or minimized.

Our Recovery also understands public engagement as reciprocal rather than as a one-way translation of academic expertise. Questions and concerns arising within recovery communities inform the topics, practices, and resources developed through the initiative. In turn, rhetorical research offers tools to examine how language, power, identity, and institutional practices shape people’s experiences within recovery communities.

Ultimately, Our Recovery demonstrates how rhetorical scholarship can move beyond academic spaces to support community reflection, education, and change. It provides an evolving infrastructure for connecting scholarship, lived experience, and recovery practice while asking what it means to create spaces in which people can experience both belonging and accountability.

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