Dear SMART Recovery Facilitators,
Happy Recovery Month! I’m inspired by the SMARTies I see spreading SMART Recovery love on LinkedIn. I imagine there are many examples on other social media platforms, too. Thank you for helping to spread the good news about SMART Recovery in your communities and online. It is appreciated!
We’ve enabled a new feature in SMARTfinder to make giving in support of a specific meeting easy. Your participants can now click on the new “Support this Meeting” button on the SMARTfinder page for your meeting, and their donation to SMART Recovery USA will be recorded as having originated from your meeting. They’ll also see the meeting number on their contribution confirmation, reinforcing the connection between the support they receive from SMART and the hard work that you put into providing it.
Offering free mutual support group meetings to the public takes resources. SMART’s budget includes approximately $360 in expenses dedicated to supporting each online meeting per year and $180 for each in-person meeting. We want to make it as easy as possible for participants to add their financial support in honor of their favorite SMART meetings.
We now have over 1,000 public meetings in the United States. If each of those meetings inspired just $25 in donations by month-end, we will have collected over $25,000! Please help us to achieve this Recovery Month goal by letting your participants know about this new pathway for giving.
For our Canadian volunteers and participants, all donations tied to a Canadian meeting number will be remitted to SMART Recovery Canada to support them in their ongoing organizational efforts.
We understand that some in-person meetings collect local donations to pay rent and certain other expenses. You may continue to do that, and we hope that you will consistently donate any surplus you collect beyond what’s needed to cover those expenses to the National Office. Those donations should still be sent in using the Group Donation Form, as a tax receipt is not provided for group donations. We also hope that you will regularly encourage folks to make direct donations to SRUSA via the button in SMARTfinder, especially if they are interested in their donations being tax deductible.
To facilitate you sharing this information with your participants, we’ve developed a flyer that can be found here. Consider generating a QR code to put on the flyer (or on screen in an online meeting) that links to https://meetings.smartrecovery.org/meetings/XXXX/, with the XXXX’s replaced with your meeting number.
Every meeting that collects at least $25 in donations via this new button by October 4, 2023 will be entered into a drawing for one free 2024 SMART Annual Conference registration or one of five free facilitator training codes.
