Two years ago, Curtis Boone was the person the Wentworth County outreach van pulled up to check on under the Route 9 overpass in Cedar Hollow. Last month, he started training the six volunteers who ride that same van now.

Boone spent nearly a decade cycling through periods of addiction, homelessness and short jail stints before the county’s outreach van began stopping by the Route 9 overpass in Cedar Hollow where he often slept. It took the same two outreach workers showing up nearly every Tuesday night for four months, he said, before he agreed to take a naloxone kit, let alone a referral.

“They never once told me I had to get clean before they’d talk to me,” Boone said. “They just kept showing up. Eventually I was the one flagging them down instead of the other way around.”

Now 41 and two years into recovery, Boone works part-time at a Cedar Hollow hardware store and spends two nights a week riding along on the same outreach van, this time training the six newest volunteers the county and Wayfinder Recovery Services have recruited since the county board approved funding for a second van earlier this year.

From client to trainer

Donna Wysocki, executive director of Wayfinder Recovery Services, said Boone’s hiring as a volunteer trainer — the first time the outreach program has put someone with lived experience in a formal training role — came out of a practical problem: the program was growing faster than it could train people to run it.

“We can teach anyone to administer naloxone in an afternoon,” Wysocki said. “What takes longer, and what Curtis is actually good at, is teaching new volunteers how to sit with somebody who isn’t ready to accept help yet without getting frustrated and giving up on them.”

Wentworth County confirmed 61 overdose deaths countywide over the past year, down from a peak of 118 three years ago, a decline officials have credited to expanded treatment beds, a hospital referral overhaul at Bellwater General and the outreach van program Boone now helps run. The second van, funded after months of uncertainty over whether the money would come through, began overnight routes in Cedar Hollow six months ago and has since added a weekly stop in Riverside Heights.

Nobody survives an overdose crisis because of one program. It’s the van finding somebody under a bridge on a Tuesday, the treatment bed that’s actually open, and now, people like Curtis who can look somebody in the eye and say, I was exactly where you are.

Donna Wysocki, Executive Director, Wayfinder Recovery Services

Six new volunteers

Among the newest cohort is Angela Reyes, a 24-year-old nursing student at Bellwater State University who signed up after a clinical rotation at Bellwater General’s emergency department. She said Boone’s training sessions look less like a lecture and more like a ride-along with running commentary.

“He’ll point out things I never would have noticed, like which corner somebody sleeps on because it’s away from a streetlight, or how to tell the difference between somebody who wants to be left alone tonight and somebody who’s actually in danger,” Reyes said. “You can’t get that out of a training manual.”

Dr. Kwame Asare, director of the Wentworth County Department of Health, said the county has leaned harder on peer volunteers as the outreach program has expanded, in part because turnover among traditional hires has been high. “Burnout on this job is real, and it’s different for someone who’s lived it,” Asare said. “Curtis isn’t doing this because a grant required a peer-support position. He’s doing it because he remembers exactly what worked on him.”

Not everyone in the outreach network has embraced the shift. One longtime volunteer, who asked not to be named because she still works other county contracts, said she worried the program was leaning too heavily on people early in their own recovery, calling it “a lot of responsibility to hand someone two years out.” Wysocki said Wayfinder requires at least 18 months of documented sobriety before anyone can serve as a trainer, and that Boone works alongside a licensed counselor on every shift.

What the work costs him

Boone said the hardest part of the job isn’t the hours, which cut into time with his teenage daughter, or the unpredictability of the routes. It’s the nights when someone he’s been checking on for months doesn’t answer at their usual spot.

“You start keeping a mental list of who should be where,” Boone said. “When somebody’s not there, you don’t always find out why for a while, and sometimes when you do, it’s not the answer you wanted.”

Asare said the county’s outreach program remains dependent on funding that has to be renewed annually, and that a full report on the second van’s performance is expected before the county board takes up the budget again. For now, Boone said he’s focused on getting his six trainees comfortable enough to run a route without him.

“I don’t need anybody to thank me for this,” Boone said. “I need the next person under that overpass to have somebody who won’t give up on them either.”