People First Radio – August 22, 2024People First Radio – August 22, 2024
People First Radio
Conversations focus on Brandon Kirk’s journey from addiction to sobriety and his new storytelling project, research-led school-based substance use prevention with Charlotte Waddell, and a Nanaimo office building being turned into affordable housing. Together they sketch how recovery is supported through personal change, evidence-based education, and practical housing solutions.
0:00•22 Aug 2024
From Addiction Stories to Affordable Homes: People First Radio on Change and Hope
Episode Overview
- Recovery can open up unexpected opportunities, with Brandon Kirk crediting mindset, community support, and sport for taking him from addiction to representing Team Canada in age‑group triathlon.
- Sharing real stories of life after addiction, through projects like Beyond Your Wildest Imagination, can give people in active addiction a crucial sense of hope and relatability.
- Traditional school programmes built around slogans like "just say no" have shown little benefit, while rigorously tested interventions such as Strengthening Families and Preventure have significantly reduced later substance misuse.
- Universal, skills‑based prevention delivered in classrooms and involving families can build resilience and social skills without stigmatising individual children.
- Converting underused office buildings into compact, self‑contained flats, as at 420 Albert Street in Nanaimo, can create relatively affordable housing options for people priced out of conventional rentals.
“If I can do it, you can do it. I was so down and out that I thought there was no hope for me.”
What drives someone to seek a life without alcohol and other drugs, and how can communities actually support that change? This instalment of People First Radio threads together three very different but tightly linked stories about recovery, prevention, and housing. First up, Brandon Kirk shares how life after addiction became far bigger than anything he imagined.
Once terrified that sobriety would be "really boring," he now runs a renovation business, races triathlon for Team Canada at the age‑group level, and is launching a video podcast, Beyond Your Wildest Imagination, to spotlight Cowichan Valley stories of life beyond addiction. As he puts it, "If I can do it, you can do it. I promise." His focus is on mindset, community support, and giving people that crucial "little bit of hope" he once found in recovery meetings.
The conversation then shifts to prevention with child psychiatrist and researcher Charlotte Waddell from Simon Fraser University’s Children’s Health Policy Centre. She explains why popular programs like "just say no" and DARE failed under rigorous testing, and highlights evidence‑based approaches such as the Strengthening Families programme and Preventure. These classroom and family‑based interventions, delivered universally and tested through randomised controlled trials, have shown large reductions in later substance misuse.
Waddell notes that prevention still only gets about 6% of health spending, despite long‑term benefits. Rounding things out, developers Adrian Vlasic and Fila Karim walk through their conversion of a vacant Nanaimo office building into 23 compact, self‑contained flats at 420 Albert Street. In their late 20s themselves, they talk frankly about sky‑high rents, code hurdles, and how shrinking unit size – not quality – helped them hit monthly rents between $999 and $1,299.
Taken together, these stories paint a picture of recovery that spans personal healing, smarter youth education, and practical housing solutions. If you’re curious about how change actually looks on the ground, this conversation offers plenty to think about – where might your own role fit into this bigger picture?
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