From Harm to Hope in Practice: A Personal Reflection from Rochdale

As the Project Coordinator of the Salik Project UK, I've spend the last few months trying to understand why help so often comes late for some families. My reading would inevitably lead back to Dame Carol Black’s From Harm to Hope review.

Black's review directed a powerful critique to the attitudes and approaches by successive governments to drug rehabilitation and recovery policy not because it offered quick solutions, but because it acknowledged complexity. Published in 2021, the review made clear that recovery does not sit neatly within one service or one intervention. It overlaps with housing, employment, mental health, family stability, and social connection. Without addressing these together, outcomes remain fragile at best and futile at worse.

This is particularly relevant for South Asian communities in Rochdale.

Recovery services locally in Rochdale are committed and welcoming, including towards South Asian populations (I know this from my own lived experience). The challenge is not a lack of intent or willingness. I've seen recovery charities trying to reach South Asian communities and I've spoken to the coordinators about the challenges they've faced while attempting to do so (one told me that they'd be trying for a decade with little luck).

My own take is that in trying to engage such communities some organisations assume a level of knowledge, confidence, and openness that many South Asian families are still in the process of developing. Stigma, honour (izzat), and limited education around drugs, addiction, and mental health shape when — and whether — people from such communities feel confident enough to come forward.

Through The Salik Project UK, much of our work in 2025 has focused on listening before delivering. We facilitated focus groups with women, families, and community influencers, speaking to over a hundred people across Rochdale. We did this deliberately before launching projects, because we felt it was essential to understand where South Asian communities actually were in their learning journey around drugs and addiction. We really began with the simple question of: what do you understand when we say the word addiction? A simple question that elicited a diversity of understandings and experiences.

What emerged was a complex that families are usually the first to reach out for help — not the individuals experiencing addiction themselves. This is not unusual, but the context matters. In communities where conversations about addiction and mental health are still becoming normalised, families often struggle to recognise substance use early, to talk about it openly, or to know what support exists.

Families told us directly that they did not feel informed enough, or emotionally supported enough, to help a loved one they could see spiralling day by day. Some shared that they only became aware of substance misuse after attending our focus groups.

One example illustrates this clearly. During a community clean-up in Deeplish, we collected more than ten nitrous oxide canisters in under an hour. Several South Asian women told us they had assumed the canisters were related to car maintenance. They were shocked to learn that young people inhale the gas using balloons. Some then realised they had seen young people inhaling balloons locally, but had never connected the behaviour to substance use. Awareness, in this case, came after direct engagement — not before it.

This reinforced an important lesson: we often assume a baseline level of knowledge when delivering recovery-related projects, without accounting for where a specific community actually is. When that assumption is wrong, engagement efforts risk being premature, however well-intentioned.

Dame Carol Black’s review speaks directly to this issue. It emphasised prevention, education, and early intervention as foundational — not optional. It also warned against fragmented, short-term initiatives that fail to address the wider conditions shaping recovery. Our experience in South Asian communities reflects this precisely.

Some issues surfaced only briefly in our focus groups — including gambling and pornography addiction — suggesting areas that require far deeper exploration. This underlines why community engagement must be ongoing. The substance-use landscape is constantly changing, and understanding must keep pace with it.

Another important distinction emerged between public and private spaces. While fear of relapse did not come up explicitly in focus-group settings, it did emerge in one-to-one conversations. This matters. It reminds us that stigma and honour (izzat) still influence what people feel safe enough to say openly — and that isolation often deepens in silence.

One of the clearest insights from both our work and Dame Carol Black’s review is that recovery cannot be delivered in isolation. Addiction intersects with unemployment, insecure housing, mental ill-health, and social exclusion. Addressing one without the others leaves people vulnerable to relapse.

Community organisations have a crucial role to play here — not by replacing treatment services, but by reducing isolation. Isolation increases the risk of relapse for individuals, and it also weakens families, creating cracks in the immediate support network around someone struggling with addiction. Without support for families, the chances of sustained recovery reduce dramatically. This is widely recognised across addiction research and practice, and it is reflected repeatedly in lived experience.

Our focus groups showed that families themselves often feel isolated, overwhelmed, and unsure how to help. Reducing that isolation — through shared understanding, peer connection, and culturally safe spaces — strengthens the entire recovery ecosystem.

This is why we believe recovery work must be collaborative by design. Dame Carol Black was clear that no single organisation or sector can do this alone. Community-led organisations like The Salik Project UK can support statutory and commissioned services by helping create the conditions in which people engage earlier, stay connected longer, and feel less alone throughout the process.

Our commitment in 2025 — and beyond — is to continue listening, sharing stories rather than just statistics, and working collaboratively across sectors. In an age of social media, a single honest story can reach someone who might never respond to a leaflet or a referral pathway. People need to see themselves reflected to believe recovery is possible.

If From Harm to Hope is to be delivered meaningfully at local level, particularly within South Asian communities, then education, stigma reduction, family support, and collaboration must be treated as long-term investments — not preliminary steps to rush through.

Recovery becomes more likely when isolation is reduced — for individuals and for families alike.