Oxford charity founder uses experience with addiction to help families recover
ADAPT develops family programme to support local people and their loved ones through addiction
The founder of an Oxford-based charity spoke about how her personal experience with addiction drove her to help others on their journey to recovery.
Eddie Cobb, CEO of ADAPT, set up the organisation to address a lack of support for people battling addiction in the city and to help both them and their loved ones rebuild.
She said: “In Oxford, there was a huge shortage of abstinence-based housing and therefore a lot of people who were going off to treatment were being separated from their families.”
The charity now offers 47 beds and provides a treatment programme with counselling, workshops, and group therapy running five days a week.
Eddie’s motivation for helping others stems from her own battles with addiction which began in her teenage years.
She explained how coming from an affluent background does not make you exempt from addiction and that she started using substances after being separated from her parents and bullied at boarding school.
While Eddie emphasised that addiction can affect anyone, she also acknowledged that many people’s rehabilitation relies on financial stability.
“I was fortunate enough when I was ready to get help there was money there for me to go to treatment,” she said. “In my last period of stint of abstinence, I really wanted to help people who couldn't pay for treatment.”
After more than eight years clean from using drugs, Eddie relapsed in 2020, which she said emotionally impacted her young children.
This then highlighted for her the importance of offering support not only for those in recovery, but also their loved ones.
“It's not just the person using substances, families go through a very traumatic experience as well,” she said.
ADAPT has since launched a family programme to help anyone impacted by addiction get the support they need.
The programme recently received funding to develop, allowing the charity to invest in staffing and create more consistency in its delivery.
Eddie highlighted her commitment to ensuring everyone has access to the treatment and changing people’s perception of addiction.
She said: “I wanted to create fairness. Whether you come from money or don't I believe in everyone being treated equally and I wanted to bring families back together and create less of a stigma around addiction.”