Elsie Demers has over 25 years experience in addiction/recovery and has worked for years helping people with substance use disorder strive for and succeed in their recovery. Having personally hit rock bottom, she realized the importance of peer to peer services as being the connective tissue between treatment to long term recovery. This is why after a long career in corporate America she left to pursue this work full-time. She then started her journey by becoming a member of the oldest grassroots advocacy group in NY LIRA. Though LIRA she traveled to Washington DC and Albany to advocate for laws to change to support recovery services. She than became a Certified Peer Advocate and a National Trainer and a Breakfree interventionist.