The Volunteer Recovery Support for Adolescents (VRSA) experiment: Recruiting, retaining, training, and supervising volunteers to implement recovery monitoring and support services

Abstract

Volunteer Recovery Support for Adolescents (VRSA) is a novel recovery monitoring and support service for youth after discharge from residential treatment for substance use disorders. Study methods and results of a randomized controlled study are presented in a companion paper and provide evidence that VRSA improves pro recovery peer and activity involvement, decreases substance use and related problems, and increases early full remission (Godley et al., under review). This paper describes the VRSA model, how fidelity was monitored, methods used to recruit, retain, train, and supervise volunteers, how well volunteers were able to implement the model, and how adolescents responded to VRSA. As evidenced by successful recruitment of volunteers to cover caseload needs, positive rates of volunteer retention, and favorable recovery support session completion rates, VRSA is a flexible, potentially low-cost model for providing extended recovery support services that is both feasible and acceptable to adolescents. Future research is needed to identify variables that predict volunteer commitment and to investigate if matching gender, race/ethnicity, or other variables affect results.