Strategy & Impact
Thank you to you and your team for all you do to support us and make this possible. Even when it feels like baby steps, hearing and seeing student stories reminds me that it truly makes a difference.
Lori Harasem
Health Promotion Coordinator, Lethbridge Polytechnic
Recovery on Campus
Established in 2022, Recovery on Campus (ROC) provides the overarching framework for campus recovery programs in Alberta, integrating direct support and research & education to create recovery-friendly post-secondary institutions. ROC aligns with the University of Calgary's Ahead of Tomorrow Strategy and the Community Mental Health & Well-Being Strategy, embedding recovery as a core component of campus well-being, student success, workplace mental health, and community.
ROC's Four Strategic Pillars
2025-2028 Action Plan
The ROC Action Plan outlines a province-wide approach to creating recovery-friendly campus communities that reduce stigma and support all pathways of recovery. It provides clear steps to strengthen peer support, education, and connection across Alberta’s post-secondary institutions.
2024-2025 Impact Report
In only three years, ROC has shown that recovery strengthens the whole campus community. With UCalgary’s leadership, ROC has awarded more than $400,000 in scholarships and seed grants, is leading Canada’s first student recovery study which will inform policy and practice and more.
Recovery Champion Awards
Recovery Champion Awards recognize recovery leadership across Alberta’s post-secondary institutions. These provincial awards share the same core values and service-based approach, while expanding eligibility to include students, staff, and faculty with lived and/or living experience of addiction-recovery. By honoring recovery champions at all levels of campus life, ROC celebrates the role of recovery-informed leadership in shaping healthier, more inclusive post-secondary communities across the province.
ROC is the program I needed both as a student in active addiction and a faculty member silenced by shame about being in recovery.
Dr. Victoria Burns, PhD
ROC Founder and Director
Hear the stories of our community members
Mansel Waskewitch
After 20+ years of drinking, Mansel Waskewitch, a student at Lakeland College in Vermillion, Alta., asked for help and started his recovery journey.
Teneaka Laboukan
Teneaka Laboucan is a ROC Recovery Champion Award winner, First Nations Indigenous of Northern Alberta, mother of 3, spouse and an addict in recovery.
Kurt Blind
Kurt is a person who is grateful to be in recovery from addictions. Kurt contributes his healing journey to spirituality and reconnection to Nehiyaw/Plains Cree and Blackfoot traditions and Indigenous ways of knowing.
Kayla French
Kayla's story of addiction is not a single event that occurred, rather a series of events that led to her coping negatively to adverse childhood experiences. Now, Kayla has been sober 15+ years and is grateful for all the people who afforded her the grace to fail before she could succeed.
Cory Whitecap
Cory is a recovering addict. On August 29, 2006 he walked into recovery and has been working on it since. Cory is a Sixties Scoop survivor, and both his parents were residential school survivors. Because there were no services available to Native people back then, they both turned to addiction to cope with their experiences, and Cory was lost to the system at 6 months old.
Liam Sorrenti
On paper, and in presentation, Liam usually resembled a competent, professional, knowledgeable, and put-together worker in his field. In reality, he was relentless in his pursuit to self-destruct, to end, which felt completely driven by something that was not him. For Liam, recovery is a path to finding something lost, restoring or strengthening well-being in a way that works for the individual.