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TMCC Is Bolstering Its Recovery Community

TMCC

Truckee Meadows Community College is getting a $10,000 grant to bolster its support for students recovering from substance abuse. Reno Public Radio's Michelle Billman has the details.

The TMCC Recovery and Prevention Club, or T-RAP, is getting the funding from Transforming Youth Recovery, a national program run by local philanthropist Stacie Mathewson. The goal is to help build up the college's support community for students.

"There's a lot of peer pressure here," says Jessica Cates, the club's vice president as well as a student in recovery. "Now, they have the Santa Crawl and the Zombie Crawl. They all of these things in this town. For somebody who has already had a problem, and they're trying to stay clean, if they don't have some sort of a support system, it is really easy for them to slip back into their old behavior."

The club's staff advisor is Camille Vega, who is the suicide prevention coordinator for the college. Vega says substance abuse and suicide are often closely linked.

"We know that substance use lowers people's inhibitions; it makes it easier to do risky behaviors such as drinking and driving or even taking that step of exploring ways to die, and so, we know there's a correlation between those two."

Along with making TMCC's student recovery community more visible and robust, the grant will also go towards contributing to the largest archive of recovery resources in the country.

Michelle Billman is a former news director at KUNR Public Radio.
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