The mission of One Day at a Time (ODAT) is to reduce the use of illegal drugs and alcohol by promoting awareness of substance abuse, emphasizing the benefits of recovery, and by seeking collaborations and offering incentives to those who share our common interest.
It is a mission well-worth pursuing.
“If we can’t calculate the human misery and repair the broken hearts,” Joseph A. Califano Jr. wrote in his book High Society, “we can put dollar signs on the cost of substance abuse and addiction.
Califano put the figure for America at a trillion dollars a year.
ODAT, a non-profit [501(c) 3] Arkansas company, was founded in Little Rock in 2004 by David Palmer, an experienced publisher and business executive. He launched the operation that year with a free quarterly tabloid publication which reached a circulation of more than 40,000 including 10,000 copies to Arkansas prison inmates during its seven year run.
“When I started the quarterly newspaper, One Day at a Time, along with a companion website nearly 10 years ago,” Palmer said, “we proclaimed on the front page our mission of ‘presenting a message of hope and recovery to a nation in need.’”
Palmer said from the outset he had three goals in mind:
“First, I wanted to expand my own personal knowledge of addiction and recovery in order to help a grandson who was having trouble with drugs and had almost died in an automobile accident.
“Second, I thought the recovery story had been underreported in the media. A lot of information about addiction is out there, but information is not necessarily knowledge. And, besides, where were the thrilling stories of people and families who get over their addictions and lead fantastic lives?
“Third, I believed making a difference had to begin at the grassroots level with families, neighborhoods, and communities. National campaigns are fine, but recovery, I believe, is achieved mainly through local programs and relationships.
“I found support for my grass roots theories in a project financed by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF), which in the 1990s gave out roughly $45 million in a series of grants to fifteen communities, including Little Rock, Arkansas.
“The Fighting Back project produced a variety of milestones in the substance abuse reduction field—some of which endure today.
“Little Rock’s successful grant proposal (written by Frankie Sarver, wife of the late Bob Sarver, Arkansas Commissioner of Corrections during the Winthrop Rockefeller administration) stated that ‘people and communities—whose behaviors are partly defined by fear, denial, hopelessness, and passivity—are dysfunctional in the same ways.
‘The disease of substance abuse,” she said, ‘affects an entire city much the same as the disease affects its individual residents. Denial prevents its identification, and an unwillingness to deal with the problem and blaming others prevent recovery.’
I stopped publishing our newspaper in September of 2011 to focus on writing the book, “Pathways to Serenity. Overcoming your addictions one day at a time” available for purchase on this site and to develop the site to reach both local and international audiences in combination with Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin.
Our mission remains essentially the same. It is to reduce alcohol and drug abuse by promoting awareness, prevention, and treatment availability in the following ways
· as a catalyst for fundamental change in public attitudes towards substance abuse
· “putting a face” on the benefits of recovery
· implementing unique teen/young adult, military, and prison outreach initiatives
As for the future, we envision a nation whose citizens recognize substance abuse as a major health problem and seek to eradicate the associated heartache of broken families, broken dreams, and broken lives through a message of hope and recovery.”
