Soul Recovery Cafe: Rehabilitating in a community

After the first steps are taken to move away from homelessness, mental health and addiction, Soul Recovery Cafe offers a space to bridge the gap to a healthier community by encouraging continued personal growth.

The model for Soul Recovery Cafe is peer support, pairing individuals who are just starting their recovery journey with people who have navigated trauma and addiction before. It aims to provide people who are in recovery and not using drugs or alcohol a place to continue recovery in a welcoming environment. The cafe opened in Albuquerque Sept. 6.

Liliana Spurgeon is the outreach marketing director at Soul Recovery Cafe. She has been sober for eight years.

The impetus of her recovery was her husband passing away in 2016.

“I neededto get (it) together. I have two boys,” Spurgeon said.

She joined a rehab program in California and then came back to New Mexico to be with family.

Wanting a better life for her boys, she went to college and was the first in her family to get a bachelor's degree. She is now working on her master's degree in public health.

“I see a lot of the community being lost,” Spurgeon said.

She’s a first-generation American citizen. Both of her parents are from Juarez, Mexico, and her first language was Spanish. The cafe caters to Spanish speakers and other underserved populations.

She got involved in Soul Recovery Cafe because she wanted to work at a diverse recovery space and because of her friendship with Elise Padilla.

Padilla is a social worker and the executive director of Albuquerque's Soul Recovery Cafe.

“Making friends as an adult is hard enough,” Padilla said. "When all of your support systems have been wiped out, we want to be a place you can go."

Soul Recovery Cafe is a network of peer support organizations based out of Seattle that has been around over 20 years. The organization gives Padilla and the Albuquerque local cafe data that can be used to help apply for grants.

Visiting the cafe and attending community meetings is free. The cafe also relies on donations.

The cafe holds meetings on Thursdays at 6:30 p.m. and Saturdays at 10 a.m. You can find out more at nmpeercoalition.org

Padilla opened the first bran of Soul Recovery Cafe in Albuquerque, at 1913 Lomas NW, because of her personal experience with recovering from mental health and addiction.

“Gathering the information that helped me in my recovery and turning that back into something sustainable,” Padilla said.

She said she strives to provide a recovery center that has the necessarily clinical and medical certificates but also tries to provide care in an empathetic and welcoming place.

This perspective creates a safe space, but “you also get called out,” Padilla said.

Key to Soul Recovery Cafe is community first and then programs. The programs offered by Soul Recovery Cafe are based on what's helped community members, Padilla said. She found recovery through traditional and ancestral healing.

Some of the services at the cafe include free coffee and tea samples while engaging in cultural healing through smudging bundles, herbalists, natural remedies and energy cleansing. There are also workshops, chair massages, limpias and mini-Reiki sessions by community curanderos.

There's also an emphasis on personal fitness and wellness. Johnny Armijo, a program coordinator for Soul Recovery Cafe, runs an addict to athlete program because exercise helped him during his recovery. The cafe will offer live music and have addict to athlete, or A2A, demonstrations at events listed on their website.