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We often treat our street intersections as meeting points, a place to meet a friend before continuing together to a shared destination. We hope to meet you at The Corner with the same goal in mind: to collaborate, walk together, and work together to better support individuals in recovery.

When the road is dark, we rely on the streetlamps and lights above us to help guide the way. The work we do for those in recovery comes with challenges, but when we hear from ATR participants, they light us up. Our ATR participants are resilient; their courage guides us and inspires us.

ATR participant Mercedes, dressed in a pink chef’s coat and hat.

She collected the ingredients to become a valuable team player and the catalyst to her team’s success at Community Servings. Thanks to the support of her instructors, ATR Care Coordinator, Mikaela, and fellow trainees, Mercedes is equipped with the tools to support her recovery and help others rise alongside her.

Read more about Mercedes below.

Mercedes described the time when she first moved to Boston as “confusing.” “I wanted to do something, but I just didn’t know how to navigate,” she explained, reflecting on the early days of her journey.

She moved to Boston with no family or community to lean on, let alone a safe place to live, but Mercedes is nothing if not resourceful. She leaned into the houseless community, which had little to give in the way of material goods but offered her connections that led her to where she is today. Through these friendships, she learned to navigate the city. “[I followed] these people around Boston on foot . . . they knew everything,” Mercedes said.

To continue in her recovery and improve her health, she found her way to St. Francis House, enrolling in the Moving Ahead Program (MAP) to maintain her motivation to go back to school and reinforce her work skills.

Once she finished MAP, Mercedes moved into a residential treatment facility, where she was connected to ATR. While her sights were originally set on going back to school, Mercedes is not one to let an opportunity pass without giving it a shot. After enrolling in ATR Career Services, “I got accepted to Community Servings, [and I said], ‘You know what? I’m going to do this,’” she shared.

With no prior experience in an industrial kitchen, Mercedes learned to measure ingredients, communicate with the team of other students, and prep, cook, and deliver orders to serve 5,000 meals each day from the Community Servings Teaching Kitchen. She shared a warning about learning to open an industrial-sized oven. “When you open it, you [push] the food [in] and hurry up and close it, because you’re going to have a tan if you don’t close it. . . I still have my eyebrows, but some people didn’t,” Merecedes said with a laugh.

She reflected on the teamwork she experienced in the Teaching Kitchen, saying that due to the amount of food being prepped and delivered, each person on the team played an important role in making sure meals were of high quality. “Teamwork is possible. Yes, you could be the ‘star’ all you want to, but teamwork? If you’re not a team player, it’s not going to work out,” Mercedes said.

Community Servings saw Mercedes’s skill and strength from the beginning. Teaching Kitchen Senior Program Manager Allison Sequeira recalled that when Mercedes joined the Teaching Kitchen, she was timid, but she soon found her footing in the class.

“We invite [prospective students] to come and spend a three-hour class with our current students. . .Current students [do not] decide who gets accepted to the program, but we are always curious to hear [how it felt] working with that person,” Allison said. “What was really cool is, by the end, Mercedes was helping [take] care of these visiting applicants.” Mercedes stepped up to teach prospective students different procedures, encouraging them along the way, and Allison said she found herself asking, “‘How can we get [Mercedes] in charge of more?’ She was really a joy to work with.”

In the Teaching Kitchen, Mercedes developed her communication skills and her affinity for teamwork, but she also learned the benefit of kitchen prep work, explaining that making the “pretty dishes” at the end requires the diligence and patience of chopping, sautéing, stirring, and all the smaller steps in between to create the end product. Her attitude toward being in the kitchen and in recovery is one of positivity. She said, “People make mistakes in their lives. What can we do to make [life] better? I just take it one day at a time, one goal at a time. It could be as simple as cleaning my room, but guess what? That’s a positive thing.” The skills Mercedes has collected throughout her life continue to support her in her journey. She is continuing to tap into her resourcefulness as she pursues a culinary career in the city. She said she is finally giving herself a chance.

When we have exciting updates about the ATR program, you can find them here. Consider this your one-stop shop for ATR announcements.

ATR Year in Review

As we began 2024, we want to take a moment to reflect on the ATR program's success through 2023. There will always be an ebb and flow of the work we put forward, but we are thankful for readers and supporters like you who make it possible for us to support thousands of individuals in recovery.

View ATR by the numbers below.

We are excited to not only share the progress of the ATR program, but also share this space with partnering organizations that are making an impact on individuals in recovery and spotlight their work. In The Rotary, we will host discussions with other organizations and discuss important topics that are affecting our community and our participants. In a rotary, you may find yourself in the midst of chaos and confusion, but The Rotary is where we come together to help one another move in the right direction.

Allison Sequeira, the Teaching Kitchen Senior Program Manager, has been with Community Servings for 9 years, and Community Servings has been an ATR Job Training provider for even longer. “We are a meals and nutrition agency,” Allison explained. “It’s a job training program embedded in a very beautiful, essentially brand-new kitchen facility.”

The Teaching Kitchen makes more than 5,000 meals from scratch each day, serving individuals and families in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire who are experiencing serious illnesses. Allison explained that the Teaching Kitchen students “find great meaning in helping make those meals, because everybody knows somebody who’s been sick with something terrible.” The “medically tailored meals” they make are designed to support each individual’s nutritional needs using high- quality, local ingredients.

ATR students like Mercedes, who is profiled in this issue’s Participant Spotlight, apply and interview to join the Community Servings Teaching Kitchen in groups that rotate through the kitchen every six weeks.

“Our students [are not] coming into a place that feels like an agency, or they feel like a client. They are coming into a sunny, beautiful workplace,” Allison said. “We have 100 volunteers every day. . .  Every one of those volunteers sees our students as a professional. . .There’s a lot of admiration and respect our students receive here, and I think that’s such a boost to people, especially folks in early recovery.”

In the Teaching Kitchen, a full-time culinary instructor works with students through a full culinary curriculum four days a week. Built into the curriculum are classes to bolster students’ job readiness skills and financial empowerment, as well as nutrition lessons.

While learning to prep and cook, Community Servings students also get to enjoy their meals together through a community lunch each day. Allison shared that the agency shuts down for lunch, when students who prepared the meal are joined by staff, volunteers, and other students to share the food. She said that this aspect of the program, “when the class made the food, for them to sit there and see people eating the food that they made, it’s so beautiful.”

In preparation for graduation, Allison shared that it is up to each student to decide what they do next in their career. They are prepared with the skills and knowledge to work in various kitchens—restaurants, hotels, grocery stores, colleges and universities, summer camps, and so on. Community Servings provides personalized career support, because factors such as involvement in the legal system, location, previous experience, and more can affect an individual’s job search.

At the end of their 12-week course, the Community Servings team hosts a graduation ceremony to acknowledge the students’ completion and celebrate their journey forward. While there are no hats donned with tassels, Allison implemented a symbolic tradition of each student trading in the black chef’s coat they wore as trainees for a white chef’s coat and hat. “For a lot of students, it’s the first time they’ve been recognized publicly in a positive way,” she said. Many students are coming from incarceration and other settings that they might not be proud of; in contrast, this ceremony provides them with the attention and praise from mentors and peers that they deserve for their accomplishment. 

ATR Care Coordinator, Mikaela Hartman, and ATR participant, Mercedes at Community Servings graduation ceremony.

The ceremony is marked and bookended, of course, by meals shared together. The day before, Teaching Kitchen graduates have full control and lead the community lunch together. They decide on the dish(es) and prepare the ingredients together, marking the end of their training. After their graduation, they enjoy a meal together prepared by the non-graduating class of Teaching Kitchen students. In this way, the cycle of inspiration continues.

“For the non-graduates to see what is coming is such a boost. It’s the end of their sixth week. They do all of the work, preparing this beautiful spread of food for the celebration, and then they attend. They get to see [through] these people who went before them . . . where they’re headed,” Allison said.

Thank you to Allison Sequeira for sharing this unique look inside the Community Servings Teaching Kitchen and for continuing to support ATR through this partnership.

We relish the opportunity to share the mission of ATR with others, so stop by the Newsstand for the latest articles or press releases from ATR.

ATR Program and ATR+ Featured in SAMHSA’s GAINS Center Newsletter

The latest newsletter from SAMHSA’s GAINS Center highlighted services for adults with mental health and/or substance use disorders (SUDs) who also encounter the criminal legal system. This included a spotlight on the Massachusetts Access to Recovery (ATR) program where our AHP team members and our partners around Massachusetts support thousands of individuals in recovery.

Click below for the full article.

There are always training opportunities, webinars, and events to look forward to. Check in here to put your next destination on the calendar!

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Recovery Education Collaborative

An initiative of the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, Bureau of Substance Addiction Services (DPH/BSAS)

Recovery Education Collaborative (REC) was established to provide quality instruction and ongoing learning opportunities for the state's substance use peer support workforce, as well as the organizations and stakeholders providing recovery support services.

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