Harnessing the power of exercise for addiction recovery: A Q&A with Gary from ARC Fitness

One of the projects supported by The Ideas Fund is ARC Fitness, an organisation based in Derry, Northern Ireland, that offers practical support for people struggling with addiction and promotes healthy and sustainable recoveries through exercise and positive lifestyle choices. The project collaborated with two researchers, Dr Leanne Doherty and Dr Clare Puddifoot from Ulster University to conduct research into gender-specific recovery programmes. We spoke to ARC Founder Gary Rutherford, who told us all about the research, what it’s like being part of The Ideas Fund and more.

What is ARC Fitness and how did it start?

ARC is an addiction recovery organisation that I set up around 5 years ago. I struggled with addiction myself for years, and then I recovered and retrained as a nurse. Exercise was a huge part of my recovery, so I always wanted to find a way to use that, as well as my nursing experience, to help other people. The organisation has grown a lot and we’ve managed to help hundreds of people struggling with addiction, as well as their family members.

What did your research focus on and what were the outcomes?

For our research project with The Ideas Fund, we focused on whether there are any differences within gender-specific groups when it came to addiction recovery programmes. So we took a mixed group with male and female participants, an all-female group and an all-male group, and then assessed if there were any differences in outcomes. Our research showed that the mixed group had the best outcomes. Interestingly, the male-only group had the highest dropout rate.

It was a small research project, but we’d like to do more research and increase our sample sizes to see if there are any patterns that we can learn from.

What was it like doing community-led research?

It was really good to have the opportunity to work with a researcher on this. Our researcher, Leanne, was really able to embed herself in our organisation. I think with a topic like addiction recovery, it’s really important for the researcher to get to know the individual behind the statistic. I think it gives the research a different perspective and allows them to see the human side of it.

We’ve learnt a lot about the research process from this experience. One of our team members acted as a project support worker throughout the research and learnt from Leanne how to use different techniques and run focus groups. So now we have the capacity as an organisation to do some research ourselves too.

'I think with a topic like addiction recovery, it’s really important for the researcher to get to know the individual behind the statistic.'

Did you encounter any challenges when collaborating with researchers?

We found the ethics process quite challenging. It took a lot of time to get our research approved, which meant that our project was late to get started. Part of our approved process was randomisation, which we later realised was really difficult. I had a waitlist of 200 people, and we had to reach out to them all and say, ‘we have this programme but you may or may not get on it’. Then people were randomly selected to participate, and we had to go back to some people and say they didn’t get on it. That’s a really difficult thing to do when you’re working with vulnerable people, but we had to do it because it was part of our ethics process. So, we’ve definitely learnt that lesson and would change our approach moving forwards.

What’s your experience been like being part of The Ideas Fund?

It’s been really good. The shared learning events in particular have been great. It’s been important for us to hear how other people doing similar things have been getting on and learn from each other.

The support from The Ideas Fund has been really good. The Fund has really taken into consideration the needs of the community sector. We run at capacity a lot of the time, and they have never overburdened us with unnecessary evaluations or paperwork.

I think this kind of approach is really important. The world of research can be very rigid, whereas the community sector has to swivel and pivot and be flexible. I think what The Ideas Fund has done is bring those two things closer together. Sometimes it’s difficult, but I think it’s really valuable. And you get a much deeper level of information and understanding from this kind of research. It allows for people to get in a room together and be vulnerable and share their experiences. That’s really important.

'The world of research can be very rigid, whereas the community sector has to swivel and pivot and be flexible. I think what The Ideas Fund has done is bring those two things closer together.'

What does the future look like for ARC Fitness?

We’re currently planning for our shared learning event, where we’re going to showcase the project and our learnings. We’ve booked out the Great Hall in the local University, and it’s already sold out and over 180 people are coming. It’s a great opportunity for us to share our experience and learnings with other organisations and services and open up the conversation about addiction. During the event we’ll have a panel discussion with some other community services like the police too.

'My hope is that we can use this research as a foundation that we continue to build on. It would be really easy to do this initial research and then not do anything about it again, but I want to embed research into our work moving forwards.'

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Thank you to Gary for talking to us. If you want to find out more about ARC Fitness, you can visit their website: arcfitness.uk