PROJECT OVERVIEW

For the past several years, the Center for the Working Poor has been incubating an ambitious, experimental project we’re calling Twelve Step for Everyone—a recovery-meets-movement model designed to build a new progressive base while strengthening the growing recovery commons. In a country living through a manufactured mental-health emergency, it offers mutual aid that can support social change: a scalable way to support existing groups and knit personal healing to collective power. This project seeks to develop a 12-step-inspired model for progressive organizing, leveraging the strengths of decentralized, mutual aid-driven communities to foster leadership development, resilience, and sustainable activism. Traditional community-based organizing has suffered due to the decline of social institutions such as labor unions, religious groups, and civic associations. Meanwhile, the success of 12-step programs, such as Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), demonstrates the power of peer-supported, self-sustaining networks. The Christian right has already adapted this model through programs like Celebrate Recovery, utilizing it as a vehicle for ideological and political mobilization for conservatives.

Our project aims to create a new innovative 12-step program to support progressive movements, and the existing recovery movement, providing a structured yet adaptable framework for engagement. By fostering personal transformation, strengthening social bonds, and creating leadership pipelines, we can build a scalable, self-funding, and self-replicating model for progressive organizing, and a bigger stronger recovery movement to address the mental health, economic, and environmental crisis of our time.

TOWARD A 12-STEP MODEL FOR PROGRESSIVE ORGANIZING 

Sociologist Robert Putnam, in his seminal work Bowling Alone, meticulously documents the erosion of communal institutions that once served as the bedrock of American civic life—voluntary associations, labor unions, mainline Protestant churches, bowling leagues, and grassroots community networks. These spaces of collective engagement, once foundational to organizing efforts, are rapidly disintegrating. And with them, the traditional models of community-based organizing, which once relied on pre-existing social structures, are becoming less effective.

There are exceptions, of course. One of the most significant in our era is the rise of 12-step programs like Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) and its many offshoots. While formally apolitical, these programs have quietly become one of the largest decentralized mutual aid networks in the world, engaging millions in personal transformation, peer support, and structured community care. Unlike traditional social movements, they are not dependent on institutional backing—instead, they operate as self-sustaining, scalable, and deeply participatory communities. With millions of participants across the globe, it has offered a profoundly effective model for building community—particularly among those struggling with addiction and the families shaped by it. But its relevance goes far beyond that.

At its core, the 12-step model offers a culture of care grounded in personal transformation. It walks people through a process called “recovery”—a journey of deep introspection and healing that is anything but individualistic. For those in traditional 12-step programs, recovery might mean sobriety. But in 12 Step for Everyone, the framework expands: it’s about becoming aware of the most reactive, ego-driven patterns we carry—the wounds and survival strategies that shape how we show up in the world, often in ways that harm others and ourselves.

And yet, for all its power, most social movement organizations lack the capacity—or even the mandate—to offer this kind of personal development work. It’s not what they were built for. Most are stretched thin already: focused on campaigns, strategy, survival. They are not designed to facilitate deep emotional processing, to cultivate mutual aid cultures that can scale sustainably, or to offer the kind of inner transformation that keeps people in the struggle for the long haul.

This is where 12 Step for Everyone becomes a vital companion to our organizing. It’s not meant to replace existing structures but to run parallel to them—offering a space where both new participants and longtime movement leaders can engage in meaningful transformation, heal from burnout and trauma, and build the kind of supportive culture that makes movements resilient.

Meanwhile, the Christian right has recognized and co-opted this model, adapting it into a conservative evangelical framework, called Celebrate Recovery that serves as both a recruitment tool and an ideological pipeline. Within right-wing religious networks, 12-step programs have been integrated into church-based recovery ministries that do more than provide support—they cultivate a disciplined base primed for political mobilization. This structure has been weaponized in service of anti-abortion activism, reactionary social policies, and broader right-wing organizing efforts.

The left, for the most part, has ignored this phenomenon. But we shouldn’t. The 12-step model holds enormous potential for progressives, offering a replicable and sustainable framework for community-building, leadership development, and collective transformation. Imagine a 12-step for everyone—a network of decentralized, mutual aid-driven groups designed to foster personal and social transformation, while simultaneously serving as an entry point for progressive activism. 

HOW IT WORKS: THE LEADERSHIP PIPELINE 

The first rung is a mass training program—accessible, open to all, and designed as an entry point into our culture. These weekend retreats offer an immersive initiation into the ethos of the 12 Steps. Over the course of the retreat, participants work through the first three steps: acknowledging the problem, believing that change is possible, and making the decision to try working the program. But this process is more than a therapeutic exercise—it’s a collective rite of passage. Here, people begin to understand that recovery isn’t just about self-help; it’s about solidarity.

From there, participants are invited into local small groups, anchoring the practice in ongoing weekly meetings. These groups are the engine room of mutual support and sustained transformation. They’re also the places where deeper leadership can take root—through step study groups, where people continue to work through all 12 steps, and/or through facilitator training, where individuals learn to lead trainings themselves.

All of this unfolds alongside a parallel track: direct engagement with movement partners. At every meeting, participants are presented with tangible ways to plug into organizing efforts—whether around climate justice, abolition, labor, or housing. The idea is not to isolate recovery from resistance, but to braid them together.

The  ladder is still being developed, but the scaffolding is there: a pipeline that doesn't just develop leaders—it reimagines what leadership can mean when it is forged in the crucible of shared struggle and spiritual growth.

SUMMARY OF MILESTONES

Our core team has spent years researching the 12-Step model and developing pedagogical and curricular materials for this project. We have written a first draft for a manual for working the 12 steps for everyone. In the fall of 2024, we held a 3-day training to launch a pilot cohort of participants, who are themselves leaders in the progressive movement. We have a pilot 12 step study group, and are recruiting and mobilizing for our second initiation training, with plans to create and scale a mass training program. We’re now seeking philanthropic partners to support the next phase of the project: building the core team, offering mass trainings, and launching 12-Step for Everyone circles across the country. More details about our plans and budget for the coming years are available upon request.