Why we created Start From Strength Foundation

By Dr. Jason Roop and Amanda Roop

Start From Strength Foundation has been recognized as a 501(c)(3) public charity. We're grateful to share that news, and we want to tell you why we created the Foundation in the first place.

A person can be ready to learn and still be unable to afford the materials or get to a program. A school may want to bring this work to its students and have no room in the budget. In a rural community, attending a training can mean a long drive and time away from work that someone simply cannot manage.

We created the Foundation because money and geography should not decide who gets the chance to understand themselves more fully. We want to help remove those barriers so more people can take part in this work.

Seeing ourselves more truthfully

The Trait-Based Model begins with strengths that are already part of us, including ones we may not recognize or know how to use well. When we've spent years looking at ourselves through what has gone wrong, it can be hard to see anything else.

Seeing ourselves more truthfully means being willing to look at all of it. We can acknowledge a harmful choice and take responsibility for its consequences while also recognizing a capacity that could be used differently.

Determination, for example, can help us keep working toward something we care about. It can also keep us pushing long after we need to stop. Learning to notice what that effort is costing us helps us recognize when determination needs balance. We can ask whether continuing in the same way is helping, or whether we need to rest, listen, or change our approach.

That is part of what we mean by starting from strength. We want people to recognize what is within them and learn how to use it with greater awareness. That understanding has a place in the choices we make each day, including how we respond when we're frustrated and how we treat the people around us.

Making the work available

The Foundation gives us a way to seek charitable support for strengths-centered education, community programming, facilitator development, and research. As funding becomes available, we hope to help with the cost of materials, participation, and training.

We also want people with lived experience of recovery, educators, and community leaders to have opportunities to guide this work where they live. Their experience gives them something to draw on as they help others recognize their strengths and put that understanding into practice. We hope to help with the training and practical resources they need to do that well.

The existing Trait-Based facilitator training offers a university certificate through Eastern Kentucky University upon successful completion and brings Recovery and Prevention together through a shared foundation. The Recovery specialty awards 10 NAADAC-approved continuing education hours. We hope charitable support can help more people reach that training and the workforce development opportunities it offers.

We want to begin by listening to the people who live and work in each community. What keeps people from taking part? Who could guide the learning? What would they need to keep it going? Those answers should shape what the Foundation helps make available.

Our hope is that more people will have a place to recognize their strengths and work through what it means to use them well. When people learn together, they also have a chance to notice strengths in one another that they might otherwise have overlooked. That can give a group more to draw on when it faces a problem or decides what to do next.

Research belongs in this work, too. We want to understand what participants find useful, where they struggle, and what changes over time. We need to be willing to learn from what we find, including when it asks us to reconsider an approach.

What comes next

The approval allows us to pursue charitable support and grant opportunities for this purpose. It does not come with funding. The activities we've described are plans we will need resources and local partners to carry out.

We're glad to have reached this point, and we're grateful to the people helping us take the next steps. We want the Foundation to make it easier for a person or a community to say, yes, we can take part in this.

Strength exists in every community. Opportunity should, too.

If you'd like to talk about what this could look like in your community, we'd be glad to hear from you. You can learn more and get in touch at startfromstrength.org/foundation.