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The recent Healing Appalachia music festival featured stars like Chris Stapleton and Tyler Childers. This year, through a sponsoring partnership from Los Angeles, Healing Appalachia also welcomed another big name: the Matthew Perry Foundation. The California organization manifests the late actor’s enduring commitment to helping others struggling with the disease of addiction.
The annual festival is dedicated to celebrating and advancing substance abuse recovery in West Virginia, Kentucky and beyond.
At the festival, Randy Yohe spoke with Matthew Perry Foundation Program Director Nick Gaines about L.A. coming to Appalachia with a mission of stifling stigmas.
This interview has been edited for clarity.
Yohe: Tell me how the Matthew Perry foundation got involved here in Appalachia.
Gaines: We just started a little over two years ago, right around when Matthew died. When we first started, we wanted to support grassroots organizations throughout California. And then after we’d done that, we said, Where is the biggest need? Where is there the most concentration of addiction in the country? And sadly, it’s here in Appalachia, specifically, West Virginia has the worst rates of addiction for opiates in the entire nation. And we were also looking to find ways to combat stigma, and you couldn’t have drawn up something that hits every mark in those two categories than healing Appalachia and Hope in the Hills.
Yohe: So, you’ve become partners with this group over the last, what, one or two years?
Gaines: Just this last year, this is our first year that we’ve done anything outside of California, and we couldn’t have found a better partner to be part of our national expansion.
Yohe: When we just met, we were over there at Camp Grindstone, which is the camp for the 400 in recovery volunteers. You guys are sponsoring and covering them with dinner and tents and the whole nine yards.
Gaines: That’s right, we’re gonna have not just the camping and the food, but also they’ll have recovery meetings. They’re gonna have yoga. There is music going on over there right now. Really a wrap around experience. there’s 400 people camping out there. There’s another 500 to 600 coming in during the day to volunteer, and all of it is really to reward these folks that have been in their recovery programs for six months a year, two years, and they really earned the opportunity to work this festival, get some important job training, get some certification for being like a peer resource support specialist, just giving people pathways from crisis to careers. That’s what it’s all about.
Yohe: I heard you mention that you were out and about down in Pikeville and Inez, you know, down there amongst them.
Gaines: That’s right. We tried to see all corners of the state. Went to Frankfurt, saw some of the folks in the state government there. And then yesterday, we went down to Pikeville where, you know, Camp Grindstone is named after one of Tyler Childer’s singles, “Nose on the Grindstone}, which starts with the line, ‘My dad as a coal man mining Pike County Coal’. So I wanted to go down to Pike County and see what he was singing about, and meet some of these folks. And you know, it’s tragic. You know, addiction, I like to say it’s a disease, but it’s really a symptom. And the disease is despair, it’s deprivation, it’s the loss of jobs, it’s the loss of community and all of that. Unfortunately, you see in Pikeville, they are fortunate in that there was a lot of money coming out of the coal mines back in the day. They’ve got the bones of a really good civil society, the medical center there, the university there, but folks are really struggling. Everybody that I talk to has somebody in their family. I don’t care if you’re rich, poor, black, white, whatever. Everybody knows somebody who is suffering from the scourge of addiction
Yohe: Tell me about the Matthew Perry foundation. I mean Chandler Bing from Friends is iconic, I don’t remember his character on West Wing, but he was a beloved actor that had his own challenges. Tell me about the foundation.
Gaines: Matthew wrote a book just before he died, and one of the key quotes from that book is that our North Star is for all the sufferers out there. He said for years leading up to his death, he wanted to be remembered for helping people that were struggling to recover from addiction like he was, and that’s what he wanted to be known for, more, even than being known for friends or any of the movies and TV projects he did over the years. This is what he wanted to be known for, helping people recover, giving them the resources and and giving them the knowledge that he didn’t always have, being in the position he was. So this is really just about honoring his legacy and meeting the mission of helping as many people as possible. That’s what he wanted to do.
Yohe: What do you think Matthew would think about if he was here right now?
Gaines: He would be so stoked. This is what we always said when we were first joining up, if we could lead a campaign to do some multimillion dollar anti stigma campaign, like the truth out action against tobacco and stuff. But ultimately, if you want to tackle stigma,then tackle stigma, and this is how you do it. You got 1,000 people here in recovery working the festival, and they’re just like everybody else. You wouldn’t be able to point out who in this crowd is in recovery and who isn’t. And that’s ultimately what fighting stigma is all about, showing that it’s not about us versus about us versus them, it’s all of us together.