“One of my favorite new participants is Sky Fiber Internet,” Jonathan Lambson, the recovery friendly ambassador at the Foundation for Recovery non profit, says of his growing list of local employers participating in a program to assist employees with current or past addiction and mental health issues.
“Sky Fiber [is] so fully supportive of their workforce. It's fantastic. They say, ‘we don't care where you come from, we just keep going, you know, we want to help people be able to turn upside down on the helicopter and fix a cell phone tower in a snowstorm.’ That is awesome, crazy stuff. But they really genuinely want to help people succeed regardless of their histories.”
On his LinkedIn, his favorite platform, Lambson recently posted about delivering an ASK box, an acronym for anonymous support kit, to the Desert Research Institute, another recovery friendly workplace. He noticed these had been placed throughout their campus, in little magnetic medicine cabinets next to first aid kits.
“And that's exactly what it is, isn't it? First aid to prevent opiate overdose death, accidental fentanyl exposure, and provide a means for someone to destroy drugs/substances they come across or no longer want/need,” he wrote.
“I’m sure many lives have been saved and harm prevented from having these supplies so readily available, and the culture that encourages this wellness mindfulness is just one of the things that makes Desert Research Institute a valuable recovery friendly workplace participant.”
The network of businesses completing and taking part in the program, which includes training and receiving an official governor’s office certificate and designation, is nearing 100 statewide.
“We have a designation ceremony where we take pictures. We provide overdose prevention kits so that all of their employees can respond to overdoses. We provide decals and posters,” Lambson explains as to some of the assistance his non profit provides to create work environments helping with the mental and physical well-being of employees.
It’s also a way for people in recovery to know a participating employer will be supportive of their healing journey, whether it be overcoming substance abuse or alcoholism, depression, anxiety, past trauma and PTSD.
The companies then become a destination of choice for government agencies or programs trying to place recovery graduates.
“There's more people coming to understand what recovery is, which is great because for the longest time it's the word recovery that has been stigmatized,” Lambson says. “You hear the word recovery and automatically the assumption is, well, I can't hire people who are on drugs and we have to correct them... And then by the end of the conversation, they realize they themselves are a person in recovery because perhaps they suffered from depression and anxiety and now they don't. So that is recovery. And so a definition of recovery is just the process of change where people find health and wellness and strive to … reach their full potential.”
Having employers and colleagues constantly mindful of individual recovery journeys is key Lambson indicates, from the day to day grind to workplace celebrations or gatherings.
The energetic 41-year-old who grew up in Northern California and moved to Reno in April 2021 openly lists on his LinkedIn all the challenges he’s been through himself, including childhood trauma, abuse, the suicide of loved ones, binge drinking and mental illness
“I had relatives who died by suicide and overdose. I have many family members who suffer from various mental health conditions. I was always told never to talk about it. And that never made sense to me because to me I felt better when I was able to talk about it, and realized that I wasn't alone.”
He quit binge drinking in his late 20s he says after getting in trouble at work and embarrassing himself in front of family.
“So now there's an organization like this that allows a mechanism and encourages employees to speak up and get some help. I think about all the times I could have gotten some help before I damaged my body. And man, I wish this existed back then,” he says.
“There are some people like myself who cannot drink alcohol because I know myself,” he explained during our interview. “There are some people who can have a drink or two and then put the brakes on and that's fine. There are some people who use marijuana and they use it as a way to recover from opiate addiction. And so for them, that looks like recovery. Maybe it doesn't look like recovery for me, but it does for them because opiates were going to kill them. And so each and every person has to find what works for them.”
Participating companies range in size and industry type, with even construction companies joining the network.
“The requirement is that they have W-2 employees, right, that they have things in place in the workplace that encourage recovery and they're willing to talk about it,” he said.
“I think we need to have these conversations,” Lambson concluded. “The more conversations, the better. The more this is normalized, the more we can catch the folks falling through the cracks. There's so many folks that think we can't talk about this, that this is a private issue, that this is a personal issue. You have this human being who is suffering regardless of whether you have the conversations or not. So literally having a conversation can save a life. There's so many people out there that can be emboldened by having these conversations. So I would just encourage folks, even if you don't work with us, to just have these conversations.”