BAC-IN Mission/Ethos & Values

BAC-IN Mission

BAC-IN Peer Led services offer culturally specific support, guidance and education for the African / Caribbean, South Asian and Dual Heritage communities. These services help address and treat substance misuse as well as other related psychological and cultural issues.

BAC-IN mission is to:

• To offer hope and inspiration and provide a design for living far beyond active addiction and far beyond the socially conditioned way of being.

• To support the primary goals of recovery that help service users to quit drugs/alcohol misuse and to help them maintain sobriety by abstaining from all mind and mood altering substances.

• To provide ongoing support for their personal, interpersonal (i.e. socialising and relating to others) and transpersonal (connected to spirituality, faith and higher consciousness) facets of recovery that are vital to fully recovering.

• To help maximise the potential and the capacity to self realise of each service user in their inner transformation as well as their journey into social integration (i.e. housing, education, training , employment etc)

• To promote abstinence based models of treatment that are effective in long term healing and are mandatory treatment options in the mainstream services.

BAC-IN Ethos

BAC-IN uses an integrated in approach in meeting the wide range of needs (i.e. cultural, psychosocial and spiritual) of the ongoing service user recovery journey.

BAC-IN recognises that the spirit, mind and body are key components in the overall transformation of service user’s holistic development.

BAC-IN provides a diverse range of services that are designed to maximise and enhance long term healing and effective recovery.

Service users are at the heart of BAC IN’s philosophy, service design and infrastructure at all stages from front line outreach and client engagement, through to planning, decision and policymaking. Most of BAC-IN staff are former service users and therefore are deeply committed to service user involvement and participation.

They are themselves living embodiments of what service users can achieve, they understand the recovery journey and are enjoying fulfilling lives that result from practicing abstinence.

BAC-IN Values

The shared values of BAC-IN are based in spirituality, human development and higher consciousness.

Most service users that enter into treatment have come from broken, disadvantaged and degenerated backgrounds, where their self esteem, self-integrity and confidence are often deeply damaged.

In the life of most addicted individuals existence is profoundly compounded with challenging issues of isolation, exclusion, deep shame, despair, fear and on occasions an unexplainable soul-loss. This way of life leads to excessive self centeredness, irresponsibility and lead to ego driven behaviours.

By ego driven behaviours we mean a life that is dominated by self deception, deceit, self neglect, resentment, bad will, rejection, boredom, desperation, anxiety, guilt, loneliness, denial, compulsion, abandonment and loss of identity.

One of the key attributes to addiction is where the addicted person is so obsessed with the drug/alcohol and becomes so self centred and thinks ‘only’ about him or herself at the exclusion of all others and everything else.

This destructive way of being often leads to a loss of self-control and an innate inability to manage their lives, their jobs as well as their relationships.

The essential aim of recovery is to help individuals to transcend and elevate their circumstance and their way of being from active addiction towards a life of well-being, good health and increase personal awareness.

As well as abstaining from drugs/alcohol, personal awareness is paramount in developing many of the character qualities that help individuals to become more balanced, integrated and enlightened.
Some of the character qualities that are fundamental to improving personal awareness, higher consciousness and spiritual development include striving to become:
• Responsible
• Self accepting
• Self-caring
• Willing to change
• Open minded
• Heart-centred
• Honest
• Transparent/Genuine
• Compassionate
• Empathic
• Motivational
• Solution focused
• Soulution inspired