FELLOWSHIP CLUB

The Fellowship Club opened in 1984, a vision of a group of recovering alcoholics from Linn County who saw the need for a permanent free-standing location where alcoholics and their families could meet regularly to provide daily, and, ultimately, life-long support to each other. With the building opening, they could provide peer mentorship to anyone who walked through the doors, from 8am to 8 pm seven days a week. The club's key programs are peer-run support meetings, intensive one-on-one sober mentorship, and restorative community service. The club hosts between 5-7 peer-run hour-long group meetings throughout the day, every day, with attendance that ranges from 10-50 or more people at each meeting. These meetings, which are run on the tenants of Alcoholics Anonymous, are drop-in, and they draw both regular, committed attendees who have been sober for decades, as well as those walking in off the street after just taken their last drink, and are in desperate need of immediate support. One of the core tenants of the program is anonymity, which allows for a level of candor and trust that often transcends what an alcoholic feels comfortable revealing even in formal treatment settings. Operating from a place of total acceptance, no judgment, and the principle that all one has been through can be used to help guide other experiencing the same struggles, the recovering alcoholics who attend the club are able to provide mentorship to each other through shared personal experiences. There are similar peer-led groups for the family members of recovering alcoholics, including ones for teenagers. In addition to the mentorship provided by these groups, the club also offers intensive one-on-one peer mentorship, known as sponsorship, where alcoholics early in their sobriety are paired with a more veteran member who volunteers to work with them individually, coaching them as they seek to rebuild a life that is not only free from alcohol, but more meaningful and productive. These relationships can last for decades. Peer mentors offer to take calls at any hour of the day or night and serve as sounding boards and guides for all struggles a recovering alcoholic may be facing, helping them to develop new practical tools to solve the kinds of problems that led to drinking. Finally, all who come to the club are encouraged to commit to life-long, active service as a way to help repair the harm they caused while actively drinking. For some members this means volunteering to do work around the building or to being on call at the local hospital to visit with those admitted to the emergency room due to their alcoholism.
The Fellowship Club has also served as a social hall for four decades of members' sober milestones, from weekly all you-can-eat breakfasts to birthday parties for reunited families to wedding receptions for members who met each other at its meetings to wakes for those who died not of drinking but of old age.