In The Rooms is a free-standing online recovery social network available 24 / 7 / 365 founded by Ken Pomerance and Ronald Tannebaum in 2008. Its purpose is to “give recovering addicts a place to meet and socialize when they’re not in face-to-face meetings.”
In the Rooms brings together members of the global recovery community to experience a vast array of tools that can enhance and expand one’s recovery experience and social connectedness. In The Rooms offers live meetings, discussion groups, and other recovery support forums to more than 650,000 people from around the world. It offers 153 live online meetings a week representing 40 different fellowship groups, including 65 AA meetings, 30 NA meetings, many other 12 Step meetings, Non-12 Step recovery support groups, and numerous specialty meetings. In the Rooms is designed to assure anonymity, with options for use of nickname, avatar, or silhouette with no personal identifying information.
In The Rooms experienced dramatic increases in participation beginning in March—from a pre-pandemic average of 200 new member registrations per day to more than 2,500 per day, as well as an explosive increase in the number of people participating in each online meeting—now as many as 500. In The Rooms has responded to these changes by:
*extending meeting times to give more participants time to share,
*adding ten new NA meetings,
*creating Marathon AA and NA Meetings that run from 9 am to 10 pm on weekends, and
*adding new ACA groups, a coronavirus support group, a NAMI support meeting, a She Recovers meeting, a Chemsex meeting, and an illness and recovery support group meeting.
Recent changes in membership, participation levels, and new support media provided via In The Rooms illustrate the remarkable adaptability of people in recovery and recovery support organizations as they respond to the coronavirus pandemic.
People in recovery and communities of recovery will come out of this pandemic stronger than ever—more confident of their resilience, more ecumenical in embracing diverse pathways and styles of recovery, and more globally interconnected. We will mourn our losses, but step into the future more assured of our capacity for survival and service