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Addiction Recovery Support for Single Mothers

SOPHIA'S FEAST

In the midst of addiction recovery, single mothers are balancing multiple responsibilities — childcare, stable incomes, and more. Sophia’s Feast provides support by offering two weekly peer support meetings with dinner and childcare at no cost and access to other resources to help you on your journey. 

Weekly Meetings

Thursdays 6pm @  Shaw Center for Children and Families

1602 N Ironwood Dr

South Bend, IN 46635

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Please RSVP to Todd (574-302-5651​) by 4pm if you would like dinner provided for you and your children

ABOUT US

Image by Guillaume de Germain

Sophia’s Feast is a peer support group for single mothers in recovery from addiction. It began at the request of one of the mothers.

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Dr. Todd Whitmore, its founder and director, has been a Certified Addiction Peer Recovery Coach in the State of Indiana since 2017. In 2023, he began working specifically with single mothers. One day, during a session at the South Bend Chocolate Factory while her children ran about in the kids’ play area, the mother said to Todd, “The hardest thing for me in coming to meet with you is finding child care for my kids. What do you think about starting a support group where the mothers take turns rotating off to take care of the children while the others meet?”

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Dr. Whitmore immediately took to the idea, and worked with the University of Notre Dame’s William J. Shaw Center for Children and Families to provide both space for the support group and child care during group meetings at no cost to the mothers – with no need for mothers to take turns rotating out of group to care for the children.

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It did not take long before we realized that what single mothers are thinking about after work and before an evening meeting is a meal for the children. Sophia’s Feast began offering a pre-group dinner to both the mothers and their children at no cost.

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We began meeting on Monday evenings, with the first gathering on September 18, 2023. We call the group, “Sophia’s Feast”: “Sophia” meaning “wisdom,” like the wisdom that the women share with each other, and the “Feast” signaling both the meal we share and the fact that the results of our coming together are bounteous. We now offer meetings on Thursday evenings.

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Not long after we started, it became clear that some of the mothers and children would need transportation to and from dinner and group. Sophia’s Feast began offering that as well.

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As part of University’s effort to provide support for the women, Dr. Whitmore also conducts research on the question of whether removing the barriers to single mothers’ participation in recovery support groups – barriers such as lack of childcare, available meals, and transportation – contributes to the mothers’ increasing what is called their “recovery capital,” that is, according to addiction scholars Robert Granfield and William Cloud, “the sum total of one’s resources that can be brought to bear in an effort to overcome alcohol and drug dependency.” Those resources can be either material (for instance, job income) or social (for example, supportive family and friends). The difficulty for single mothers is that all of their time is taken up in work and childcare, with little to no time left for focusing on recovery. Sophia’s Feast, therefore, is at once a service – removing the barriers to peer support group participation – and a research trajectory.

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In March 2023, Dr. Whitmore received a Spring 2024 Large Social Sciences Research Grant from the University’s Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts in support of Sophia’s Feast, enabling support for both the current Sophia’s Feast and its expansion to include the local partner, the YWCA of North Central Indiana, the largest regional provider of domestic violence services, including emergency shelter for women and children fleeing violence.

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