Could connection help someone in recovery? In this Heterodox Academy virtual colloquium, psychologist Andi Clements of East Tennessee State University describes Uplift Rides, a volunteer rides program in northeast Tennessee. Volunteers from the faith community drive people in addiction recovery, recently out of incarceration, to job training. The ride meets a practical need, and the driver’s aim is to build a relationship. The riders live in sober living homes that require abstinence, and they are not required to attend church or express any faith.
Clements shares the first 17 months of data: 174 riders and more than 40,000 miles. In an early survey of 20 riders, all 20 said their drivers seemed to care about them, and none said they felt judged. She is clear about the limits. This is a program evaluation, not a formal research study; the samples are small, and she has not yet compared riders before and after, so the talk does not show whether the rides change outcomes. A transcript of Clements’s talk follows below.
Andi Clements: Thank you so much. I’m really tickled to be invited to be here. I’m going to talk today about— I have so much research in all of those areas that you just mentioned, and community activity, but I’m going to talk about one particular project that we’re working on that I have hot-off-the-presses data for. And as you said, we’re trying to mobilize the faith community to address addiction, mental health challenges, whatever life things are going on. This is a— it’s actually a paper that is under review. I’m hoping that it ends up being published. And some of my co-authors are listed up there. It’s me, a doctoral student who is now assistant director of a center here on campus, and then our executive director and our transportation coordinator and a woman with lived experience who runs a sober living house, set of houses here in the area.
And I’m going to first, introduce myself quickly, because it’s important who I am as to why I’m doing what I’m doing. I am a professor right now at East Tennessee State University. I’m about to transition to West Virginia University over the break. So early next year, I’ll be transitioning to a position there where we are— I’m going to be co-director. We’re developing a center called the Rockefeller Neuroscience Institute PRISM Center. PRISM stands for Practice, Research, and Integration of Spirituality in Medicine, which is, I got to write my dream job, which is: let’s actually integrate spirituality, religion, religiosity into how we care for people, with collaborative input from both sides as we develop materials and practices and so forth, and do the research on it, which is what I do.
And so what we do as an organization, the Uplift— I’m going to mention also the co-founder and president of Uplift Appalachia, which is a— and I do, up here, down here, I guess we say “Appalachia.” But what we do is we do a lot of the church equipping to be able to collaborate with people in— it could be in healthcare, it could be in recovery areas, it could be in mental health services, it could be job training, all of those kinds of things. And so right now we have funding to do two things. One is to co-train, or collaboratively train, community members, healthcare organizations and the faith community to work together. And so we do a lot of training in trauma-informed care, a lot of training in understanding addiction, a lot of training in why the church should even be involved in this and why you would want the church to be involved in caring for your patients or clients or whatever. The other piece is a transportation program that I will talk about in a minute, because that is the main thing that I’m going to talk about.
So one of the things that we are so interested in is— and I don’t know how familiar you are with particularly rural Appalachia, but we are in a rural area, northeast Tennessee, southwest Virginia. I’ll be going to West Virginia and so forth. And one of the greatest barriers is transportation, as far as social determinants of health go. And so that’s one of the biggest predictors, and maybe barriers, of flourishing and people in our area, because it keeps you from being able to get to work, get training for work, get to the store to buy food, get to court appointments to stay out of jail, whatever it is. There’s so many things that hinge on being able to get where you need to go, and we just do not have any kind of public transportation. Even the small town I live in, a town of about 70,000, we do have public transportation, but only during daylight hours and only on weekdays, you know? And so there are a lot of gaps there. And so I learned just recently we do have two taxis for 70,000 people. So you can kind of see the problem. We’re not a big Uber place.
So the other piece, though, that we’re looking at, and I’ll talk about this more in a minute, is looking at interpersonal connection. We know that a lot of people nowadays talk about “the opposite of addiction is connection,” and things like that. And so one of the things that we have been looking at, and I have particularly in my research, is even looking at a neurobiological explanation, I guess, for why interpersonal connection is so related to addiction. And so we do know that things that increase interpersonal connection are beneficial for staying in recovery, getting in recovery and so forth. And one of the things that we really want to study— we have not yet, but I’m fixing to go to a neuroscience center, so I hope I get to— is looking actually at the neurobiology of that connection and how that relates to substance use and so forth. I’m not going to go into the whole thing, but I have some writing on that if anybody’s interested in talking about it, or other things that we have written about for that. But that is what sparked this idea of ways to get the church involved in people’s lives so that they could increase the people’s availability of interpersonal connection.
And so, from where this came from, a little bit of history. Before 2019, this was a very serendipitous forming of a nonprofit. Before 2019, we had a little church plant and a high-need, high-homelessness, high-addiction, high-poverty area of Johnson City. And so we, in that process, we had found that as people came into the church, people with cars would give the people that were just, you know, walking through the neighborhood and happened to become involved in the church— were giving people rides. It might be to church, it might be to the grocery store, it might be to a doctor’s appointment or whatever. But what we saw was that the people that were getting the rides were getting better. They were getting jobs, they were getting housed, they were staying in recovery and so forth. And so the pastor said, “What if we just tried to actually multiply that and get other churches to try to do that?” Hence the name Uplift. It’s a play on the word “lift,” but we didn’t spell it with a Y, just for copyright things. But it was really based around this rides idea.
2023, ‘24, we did get some kind of seed funding to start really formalizing the organization. And then in ‘24 we got a grant, an opioid abatement grant through our state, to partner with an organization that I’ll describe in a minute. How about that? There we go. So what happened was this organization got a grant to form a partnership. They already had an existing program for people trying to prepare employers to employ people, second-chance employment, so people coming out of incarceration, to get them into jobs and prepare the workplaces for the people to work, so that they were more recovery- and incarceration-reentry-friendly. This grant that includes us was sort of a Caring Workplaces 2.0. And so it’s a collaboration between two different organizations that provide sober living. One has sober living for men; that’s Recovery Resources. And Bridge to Shore is sober living for women. TCAT is the Tennessee College of Applied Technology. It’s a tech school that is in a nearby town. We have a peer help program through our hospital system called Ballad PEERHelp. Caring Workplaces is the work development equipping part of it; that is the funded entity. And then the Addiction Science Center is doing the program evaluation.
We are, as Uplift Appalachia, doing the transportation to get people who have just recently come out of incarceration, are living in these sober living houses, and are going to training through this tech school. So some of it is long-term, like, you know, 12-month, 18-month, whatever, full-blown tech programs. Some of it is just short-term special industry training: OSHA training, multimeter training, just forklift training, things like that, where they go for just a few weeks and get those trainings. But what we do is we get volunteers from the faith community to give the rides. That is the goal. But what we want is not just that the volunteer would give them a ride, although they do, and they get where they need to go, which is the first piece. They don’t get the training if they don’t get to where they’re trying to go. But the ulterior motive of the driver is to build a relationship with the people that they’re driving. And so what we’re trying to do is build a supportive community. So the ride provides the practical need.
We do equip the drivers. We would love to say that we started out years ago, when we first started, “Let’s do some training, let’s inspire the church,” and they’ll say, “Oh, what can I do?” And we’ll say, “Oh, you could give people rides,” and this will work wonderfully. But that didn’t really— the training was there and they would do it, but they didn’t do the next piece. And so it was only when we ended up contracted, and we have to get these people from here to there, that we started begging people hard enough to get them to actually do the rides. So now we are doing that. But the idea— and so we do some of that training, some of the drivers go to that training, but the way our training really looks most of the time is much more organic than that, and I’ll talk about that in a minute.
So just to give a snapshot of this: we have two programs that we take them to, the regular training or the short-term industry training. We’re going among three towns. We’re called Tri-Cities, but one of the towns is actually a fourth one, so two of the Tri-Cities and then another town. Two trips a day for each of those programs, four days a week, so up to 48 rides a week. We’ve never had to do 48 rides a week, thank the Lord. So some of them actually drive, some of them carpool, some of them don’t go every day and so forth. But in essence, we could have that many a day. All of the people that are being given rides live in sober living. They’re regularly drug screened, they have mandatory meetings, so forth. It is an abstinence-based program, so they’re all abstinent from mind-altering substances. They did— mental health meds they could still use, but it doesn’t include MOUD.
The drivers can drive as much or little as they want. They can do one time every six months; they can do four days a week if they want to. They all drive in their own cars. Sometimes we do have people with church vans that will drive a church van if we have several riders or something like that. We do have a full-time coordinator that does this. We have contracted a few part-time paid drivers to fill in the rides, because one of these is— it’s in a nearby town, and they have to be in another town by 7:30 in the morning. So you’ve got a driver getting up at 6 o’clock in the morning to go pick people up. That’s a really hard one to do with volunteers, so we usually pay for that one. But so we do sometimes drive, and then some of the staff drive at times.
So we do want people to be equipped in both trauma-informed care training and understanding addiction. We recruit them. Most of the time, what we end up doing is somebody rides with somebody and trains them on the way. It’s like, “Come ride with me. I’ll show you how it works, and we’ll talk through this,” and then coach them as we go, instead of having them come sit in a classroom and take notes and things like that. But we do also have training videos if people want to watch through: here’s what we’re trying to do, and here are the things to watch for, and so forth. Most of the time, the people that have volunteered so far are already quite equipped in that. They’re ready for it. They want to do it. And so they’ve already kind of explored what they need to know there.
At this point, the evaluations that we’ve done: we evaluate the drivers. Yes, you’ll see the response rate as of the time this was written was four. I think we’ve had a few more since then. Riders, about 20. So this is very preliminary. We have a lot more folks that have been doing this since, but we just haven’t analyzed the next set of data. We’ve had 119 attend those trainings that are included here, but we’ve done a lot more training. Then we’ve just got the records of doing this. So this is on the first 17 months of the program, which started January of ‘25. And then we did some interviews with our community partners as we were getting ready to submit this article.
So in that first 17 months, we had 174 unique riders. A lot of them ride multiple times, but unique riders. 1,900 trips. As far as how many per month, two to 24, depending on what programs are going on. This is the big one: 40,000, over 40,000 miles in that first 17 months. And when you see the number of drivers, which is not many, we have 13 volunteer drivers, and a few part-time folks that do some. And so this, the darker line here is the— the darker bottom part is the proportion of rides being covered by volunteers, as opposed to the paid drivers. And that has gotten better. We’ve gotten a lot more volunteers since then. And so it’s improving, but it’s slow.
But then some of the— we wanted to find out what the riders are thinking about this, because the whole idea is we’re going to— you know, they’re going to feel loved and cared for, and hopefully it would reduce stigma and so forth and so on. And so 100% of them: drivers care about me. And zero feel judged. Those, to me, are the two pivotal questions there. You know, we’ve got, like, how safe is it, and things like that. Most people enjoy the ride, so forth. The other thing is, 15% have attended the driver’s church, one of the drivers’ churches. That’s not a requirement at all. You don’t have to express faith. You don’t have to buy in or whatever, but you’re welcome. And so some of them have attended church with them. Some of them just feel cared for and go on about their way and don’t get involved and so forth.
But this— when we looked at the before, we had some of the drivers thinking, “I don’t know about the people in my car.” And the drivers saying— I mean, the riders saying, “Oh, those church folks are going to judge me.” And that just evaporated when we first started doing it. It was just like, that was not even an issue. It’s like, they’re just people. We’re friends. We care about each other. We check on each other and so forth. We did ask about what the current life concerns were, and transportation, as we knew it would be, was the top. And so we’re meeting a need that is just always there. It’s always there. We would love to solve that. We have enough churches that one day, maybe.
And then we want to talk a little bit about the training, since we had so few drivers to respond. The trainings that we do with the— and I call this the pool of potential drivers, because when we have churches that come to training, those theoretically are people that will end up driving, I would hope. But we look at: does our training have an effect on the views of the people that come to the training? And we’ve seen that they really do learn about how trauma can affect people. They really have learned about drug and alcohol misuse, and they are willing to work with people who have these challenges. But we have found that the barrier, which probably is what’s preventing a lot of the volunteering, is lack of time, and the emotionally challenging nature of the work, which it is. So emotionally challenging. I mean, it just— if you’re working with an addicted population, it just is. And then the feeling unprepared. But we are all about preparing somebody. If that’s your barrier, we will get you prepared.
And so then the drivers that we have are very empathetic. They said that the driving did not change that, but they’re the ones who were already ready, so I think they were already empathetic. And so either good, better, a lot of empathy for people who struggle with drugs and alcohol. And then when we talked to the community partners, they were just so, so encouraging. And I have a little quote at the end.
But the main thing that we end up doing is hours and hours and hours and hours and hours and hours of relationship building: between church leaders and the organizations, between the churchgoers and the leaders, among the partners, among the people and the people. You know, it’s just, there’s so much. I tell people, “17 coffees and three meals just to do a training.” And then, you know, how many coffees you have with somebody before you can say, “Okay, get in the car with me and let’s go for a ride,” or whatever, to potentially drive. So there’s lots of this relationship building and trust building, particularly between the church and the treatment community. So we do a lot of liaising among those.
Some of our limitations right now: it’s not a formal research study. Hopefully when I go to West Virginia— that’s a big part of what my job is going to be, is studying some of these programs that can be effective. And so hopefully I’ll have the capacity to begin more formalizing data collection and so forth and so on. We have small samples right now. The survey distribution— we wrote a grant last year to actually pay someone to do our data collection and make sure it’s happening. The thing is, we didn’t get it. The thing that has happened is our transportation coordinator has been the one that’s also making sure the data are getting collected, and she is busy filling slots all the time, and that is, like, the 13th thing on her mind, not getting those out. So it’s been kind of spotty data collection, but hopefully that will ramp up too, as we get some bandwidth to do that.
We would love to— right now, we have not looked at the pre-post change in the riders and the drivers. That’s the thing that I’m really interested in, in the long run, as seeing: is this thing actually changing both of them? Which I think it is, and anecdotally, I would say I really trust that it is. But we haven’t been able to show that yet empirically. Hope to one day.
This is what one of our community partners said: that “what makes Uplift Rides model unique, it goes far beyond simply providing a ride from one place to another. Yes, it creates meaningful connections between our participants and members of the faith-based community in a natural, informal setting.” And they— this is such a great set of partners working on this. Everybody is trying to help everybody to do it well, because everybody has, as the main goal, helping the people that we’re helping. It’s not like, “Let’s get the next grant,” or “Let’s make sure we look good,” or whatever. It’s— everybody is kind of teaming up to help the actual participants, which I love being a part of.
I just want to say thank you to— those are our funders and our other partners and so forth. There are some email addresses and all of the folks that you might want to connect with to find out more about this. And then, and I’m happy to share this, I don’t know if you share the PowerPoints, but— and there’s my— some of the references, just to prove that it’s science.
