This experience led David to co-found Circle of Recovery, a group for recovering addicts to share their stories with and support each other. Through this group, David finally came to terms with the harm his addiction had caused others, particularly the sons he hadn’t raised. It also taught him a lesson that went completely against the received wisdom of drug abuse recovery. The standard model was to take recovering addicts out of their communities. But David learned otherwise. Your own community, as a loving and supportive force, could—and should—help its own.
New and untested, this insight could not have come at a more opportune time. East Palo Alto had been named the murder capital of the country. The old methods had failed. The FBI and the police force had been cracking down causing even more tension within the community. The mayor of East Palo Alto, who had seen a Bill Moyers documentary on Circle of Recovery, asked to meet with David and requested his involvement in reducing the crime problem in East Palo Alto.
David was ready. He had the gall to think big and was poised to extend his personal victory to others. Equally importantly, he had clear ideas to share with the mayor. From his own journey, David knew that though East Palo Alto provided many different services—for violence prevention, substance abuse, and public health—little communication and virtually no alignment existed among the groups. Also, recovering addicts needed housing, jobs, transportation, and support—and no organization had a holistic approach to providing these services. David was convinced that the best approach to treatment involved housing the entire spectrum of services under one roof inside the community.
David collaborated with two like-minded change agents: Priya Haji, a Stanford University student, and Vicki Smothers, a community activist from East Palo Alto. In 1993, with help from Echoing Green, they launched Free at Last, an East Palo Alto-based service to help recovering addicts. Its motto is “In the community, by the community, for the community,” and its mission is to provide drug intervention and prevention services to local residents, with a special focus on those affected by incarceration, HIV/AIDS, and intergenerational addiction. Free at Last's clients are assisted by "people who look like them, smell like them. Were them."
Free at Last operates locally and is staffed by community members. 65 percent of the group’s staff members are in recovery, 85 percent are local residents, and many are former clients of the program. Free at Last provides a wide array of services, including bilingual twelve-step programs for substance abuse treatment, job placement services, transitional housing, HIV prevention and education, and social support. Its clients are assisted by “people who look like them, smell like them. Were them,” says David.
Because Free at Last’s model represented a paradigm shift in substance abuse treatment strategies, David often struggled to win support. But something that he calls his “intestinal fortitude” would not allow him to give up. Intestinal fortitude cannot be imposed externally; rather, it is rooted internally, within the certainty that the work being done is important. Soon the proof came in waves of real change. The first year that Free at Last was in existence, the crime rate in East Palo Alto dropped 87 percent. Now, over a decade later, the organization has served more than 30,000 clients. Its model is being adapted internationally—from Massachusetts to Kenya. David travels around the world 100 days a year to speak about his organization and teach its lessons. In 1994, he was awarded the California Peace Prize.
David has returned to San Quentin several times since his release. But now it is to work with incarcerated men. He helps them search deep inside themselves and find the power to change as well as become agents of change. The journey that started in San Quentin continues, in San Quentin and all over the world.
