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The forecast for Wednesday, March 7 is for a lot of snow, so we have decided to cancel the Wednesday night meeting at the Grove in New Haven.  We’ll be back at the Grove next week.

SMART Recovery CT is offering two new meetings to assist both teens recovering from addiction and their friends and families. Both meetings are held on Mondays from 6:30 to 7:30 PM at the Childrens Center of Hamden, 1400 Whitney Avenue, Hamden, CT.

SMART Recovery is a free, abstinence-oriented, peer-support group based on cognitive behavioral approaches to addiction recovery. The teen meeting is open to any teen with an addiction to drugs, alcohol, gambling, or other dependencies. The second meeting is open to friends and families who want to help their loved ones succeed in addiction recovery. There is no charge for the meetings, but donations are welcome.

The face-to-face meeting at the Southbury UCC gets its first weather-related cancellation in just it’s second week! Since there is a winter weather advisory and the forecast is for snow and freezing rain, we thought we should cancel the December 22 meeting.

Since the Wilson branch of the New Haven Free Public Library will be closed on December 23 and December 30, 2017, we will not be able to hold our regular Saturday morning face-to-face SMART Recovery meeting. (We haven’t found changing meeting locations for one or two weeks to work well.)

As it’s a while since we last held a volunteer meeting, we decided to hold one in the freed-up Saturday morning time slot. So, we will be holding a meeting for facilitators and other volunteers in the Cafe at IKEA, 450 Sargent Drive, New Haven, starting at 10:15 AM on Saturday, December 23.

Besides talking about starting new meetings, publicizing meetings, running more effective meetings, we will discuss holding regular volunteer meetings during 2018.

SMART Recovery is expanding to the other end of New Haven County. After holding meetings in the New Haven area since March, 2014, we are starting our first meeting on the I-84 corridor in Southbury, Connecticut.

Meetings will be held on Friday evenings from 7:00 to 8:30 PM in the parlor of the United Church of Christ (UCC) at 283 Main Street North in Southbury. (UCC hosts several other recovery meetings.) Main Street North is also Rt. 6 and Rt. 67. UCC is just north of the Southbury Plaza, off exit 15 of I-84. It’s an easy drive from Danbury or Waterbury and a slew of other towns.

There’s free parking in the UCC lot. Enter the building via the left of the two ground level doors accessible from the lot, then go up the stairs to the top level and head around to the left to find the parlor.

(There will be no meeting on March 23 or April 16 due to other events happening at UCC.)

There will be no Saturday morning meeting on November 11, 2017 as the Wilson Branch Library will be closed in observance of Veterans Day. We will be back on Saturday, November 18.

Joe, the facilitator for our East Haven meeting at the Hagaman Memorial Library on Friday afternoons, has been suffering from a severe health problem since April. He has reluctantly decided to suspend the Friday afternoon meeting until he’s well enough to facilitate again.

Fortunately, we have many other meetings in the New Haven area.

Best wishes to Joe for a speedy recovery, and thanks again to the Hagaman for providing the space and supporting the meeting.