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AUBURN — Jesse Harvey and Eric Skillings will be the guest speakers at the L-A Rotary Lunch Club meeting, noon to 1 p.m. Thursday, May 31, at The Village Inn, 165 High St.
Harvey, in long-term recovery, is a certified intentional peer support specialist and is the founder of Journey House Sober Living.
A decade of drug use, marked in the end by trauma, psychosis, incarceration and extreme isolation, brought Harvey to a very dark place. After several overdoses and suicide attempts, he was involuntarily committed for a fifth time into a treatment facility in a Massachusetts state prison. In mid-2015, he was discharged to a Portland recovery house and, with the support of his peers and with opportunities for growth, began to rebuild his life. Today Harvey is a passionate recovery advocate who seeks to improve communities by advocating for and implementing low-cost, low-barrier, and evidence-based public health interventions.
Harvey works full time as a peer support coordinator for Greater Portland Health and volunteers as chapter lead of Young People in Recovery in Portland. He is a member of the board of directors of the Health Equity Alliance and serves on numerous other boards and committees.
Eric Skillings grew up a broken kid, who did not know how to deal with his emotions. He turned to alcohol at a young age after the divorce of his parents. In that bottle, Skillings found relief from his childhood for the first time. He was in and out of jails starting at the age of 11, and when he was a young adult he was injured in a work accident and became dependent on prescribed opioids.
It wasn’t long before he went to prison as a direct result of his substance use disorder. He was defeated by the disease but found help through a nine-month rehab program in prison. Upon release, he quickly became involved in the Southern Maine recovery community, and today he has three years of recovery and co-owns and manages Journey House Sober Living’s two Sanford recovery houses.
Reservations are not required at the luncheon. For more information on future Rotary speakers, contact president and program chairwoman Monica Millhime, 207-713-7045, or email millhime@myfairpoint.net. Events and other club information are posted at www.lewistonauburnrotary.org and www.facebook.com/lewistonmainerotary/.
