On March 15, 2020, Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker held a press conference.

This was unusual behavior for the popular Republican governor of a blue state whose style of governance was notably low-key: unusual because the press conference was on a Sunday. But it was not nearly as unusual as what he was about to say: “I am ordering a three week suspension of school operations for educational purposes for all public and private elementary and secondary schools.”

During the same press conference, the governor banned all public gatherings of more than 25 people. As the head of social and streaming media for a large NPR affiliate, I was doing my job: pushing the news to Twitter, to Facebook, to Instagram; getting a push notification onto subscribers’ phones. As I was typing I was also thinking: On Friday, Massachusetts hosted 2300 in-person recovery gatherings a week. On Monday, March 16, there would be none - or at least none that were legal.

That night, text threads and private Facebook groups of people in recovery began to light up. What were we going to do? What would happen to the person on day one, the person who was desperate to get sober, when there were no recovery meetings?

The liquor stores were still open, but the church basements were closed.

Over the next few weeks, many local, in-person recovery groups tried to move to Zoom. But few people knew how to secure them, and many were subject to what became known as “zoom bombing,” where trolls would crash a meeting and yell slurs or threaten the participants.

Clearly, we needed to do more than just put the meetings online: we needed to make them safer for participants, too. I heard about a group hosting meetings online - private at first to keep the meetings secure for the people who showed up to them.

The group committed early to having meetings every day of the week, but quickly began calling people to help shoulder the load, to have meetings at different times of day, in different time zones. As someone with long-term sobriety, I felt a sense of responsibility, and so as a night owl, I started our first late-night meeting.

At first, we didn’t even have a name, and we weren’t an AA group — just a group open to people from every pathway to recovery. Hosting meetings was eye-opening. Meetings often had over 300 attendees, and over 100 adding their daycount in the chat when we asked who had less than 30 days sober.

As I listened to their shares, I knew that stopping drinking suddenly could be very dangerous, but it was clear to me that some of them did not.

My concern for them made me realize that I had a very different responsibility in our group — which by then was called The Luckiest Club — than I did as a member of a recovery group who might volunteer to lead a day’s meeting and call on whoever had their hand up. Many of the people I was encountering were very isolated and vulnerable: I realized I had to be just as sure of the facts when I spoke in these meetings as I did when I was putting the news out online at my day job.

I signed up for a class at a local university on the science of addiction and co-occurring disorders and started to learn how much I didn’t know: 9 out of 10 people who need help with a substance use disorder never get to see a professional. More than half have a co-occurring mental health problem.

I had been working in the news industry since 2005, but I became increasingly fascinated by the science of behavioral health and co-occurring mental health disorders. I was also living through what felt like a Cambrian explosion of recovery programs: the pandemic had prompted the creation of what seemed like dozens of new approaches to peer support and recovery programs, from apps to virtual communities.

I entered a grad school program in 2025, where my research interests involve community solutions to community issues, primarily around supporting people with behavioral and mental health concerns. I realized after a discussion with Dr. Melanie Sonsteng-Person, a researcher and professor at Salem State University, that many of my motivations and interests were the same ones that initially drew me to community media: essentially, my sense that we could create community solutions to community problems.

1 in 10 Americans will qualify for a substance use disorder diagnosis over their lifetime, and 1 in 4 for a mental health disorder. While the most recent year showed a drop in overdose deaths, soaring rates of overdose over the past decade plus has touched every corner of American society, and during the pandemic, deaths from alcohol related causes surged dramatically.

It feels like there’s never been a better time to make a difference.

In the coming year, I will be posting here about what science is telling us about community approaches to mental and behavioral health. I am deep into the reading on the topic and working on an annotated bibliography of notable studies, books, and other resources on the topic. I’m also thinking about putting together a resource page on peer support resources for people with mental and behavioral health concerns, the things I’ve learned in the past year about mental health and elders, and the infrastructure we need in America to take care of each other. If you’d like to get in touch with me, please feel free to email me at l_tomlinsonwilliams (at) salemstate (dot) edu.