Garden State Equality WEAVE Conference 2026
Additional reporting added by health editor Steven Russell
New Jersey’s first LGBTQ+ recovery conference brought together peer recovery specialists, clinicians, advocates, students, community organizations, vendors, and people with lived experience for a full day of workshops, conversations, networking and community building.
The WEAVE Recovery Conference — Wholeness Empowered through Action, Vision and Equity — focused on culturally responsive recovery and the experiences of people in marginalized communities, including those who are LGBTQ+, Black, Indigenous, people of color, disabled and justice-impacted. The conference, held July 9, was co-hosted by the New Jersey Coalition for Addiction Recovery Support and queer civil rights organization Garden State Equality at Bell Works in Holmdel.
Inside, participants moved between workshops and vendor tables, stopped for conversations in the hallways, shared lunch and connected with organizations. A first-of-its-kind event in New Jersey, WEAVE was creating space for conversations that often sit at the edges of traditional recovery settings: identity, culture, belonging, sexuality, stigma, access and the value of lived experience.
Aisling MacDonald and Damien Lopez of GSE explained how WEAVE came together, what they hoped participants would take from it and where this work might go next. MacDonald said the original idea for WEAVE began with her and Josh Sheldon of Prevention Links, a nonprofit organization that advocates for addiction prevention and recovery, and eventually became what she called a “whole barn-raising team effort” involving GSE, NJ-CARS and others.
MacDonald emphasized the significance of the event itself. “It’s kind of the first time New Jersey has ever done something like this,” MacDonald said, noting that only a few efforts have happened elsewhere in the country.
Recovery has context
One of the clearest themes of WEAVE was that recovery does not happen outside of culture. MacDonald described how marginalized people may arrive with very different histories of trust, access and institutional experience. “If you have marginalized identities, you do not have the same trust in the bank or resources in the bank to make use of these things,” she said. That idea was visible throughout the conference. The workshops and conversations did not separate recovery from identity. Instead, they explored how sexuality, gender, race, disability, justice involvement and lived experience can shape treatment, peer support and community.
At the conference, Noel Ramirez, a licensed therapist and an Out In Jersey Media contributor, held a workshop that focused on queer men’s nervous systems, including cruising, sexual intensity, intimacy, anxiety and recovery. For gay and queer men, sexuality can carry many meanings at once: pleasure, liberation, connection, secrecy, validation, shame, loneliness or belonging. Recovery conversations therefore benefit from moving beyond whether a behavior is simply “good” or “bad” to instead asking about that behavior. Sometimes intensity is pleasure. Sometimes it is connection. Sometimes it is a way of regulating anxiety or loneliness. And sometimes those things overlap, consistent with the larger purpose of WEAVE: making enough room in recovery conversations for the whole person to show up.
A major part of the organizers’ vision was creating stronger connections between LGBTQ+ services and the peer recovery community. “We really wanted to rely on folks who were working in recovery to be that voice,” Lopez said, describing the need to connect LGBTQ+ services with peer recovery specialists, and reflecting an important part of WEAVE: LGBTQ+ organizations do not have to pretend to be experts in every dimension of recovery and recovery organizations do not have to work separately from LGBTQ+ communities. Lopez emphasized collaboration, and both he and MacDonald acknowledged the importance of continuing to build these spaces alongside people with recovery expertise.
At one workshop, clinicians asked peers: “What do you wish a therapist would know?” MacDonald summarized that by saying: “Bridging gaps always requires humility.” Clinical knowledge matters. Peer knowledge matters. Lived experience matters. WEAVE created a space where those forms of expertise could be in tune.
GSE WEAVE Conference photos by Steven Russel
WEAVE Conference 2026
A strong response to a new kind of conference
Lopez said organizers received encouraging feedback from vendors and participants about foot traffic, networking and opportunities to connect with one another. The outreach was intentional. Rather than limiting promotion to existing recovery spaces, organizers contacted colleges and people who might be considering future work in behavioral health or recovery. “It’s also an opportunity to be part of the conversation,” Lopez said. For a first conference of its kind in the state, that mattered. WEAVE was not only speaking to people already established in recovery work; it was also inviting the next generation into the room.
The conference was offered free of charge. MacDonald described cost as “an automatic barrier to entry.” That commitment to access was part of the larger meaning of equity at WEAVE. Equity is not simply inviting people into a room; it means considering what might prevent them from getting there. Lopez also spoke about stigma within LGBTQ+ communities around recovery, substance use and the ways people socialize and connect. Creating spaces such as the one WEAVE created, according to Lopez and MacDonald, offered another way to bring those conversations into the open.
some of the barriers LGBTQ+ people can encounter in addiction treatment are maganified by an attendees response [that] was essentially: What barriers? She had never considered them
The importance of visibility
Russell, who is Out In Jersey Media’s health editor, found that his own experience at WEAVE reinforced another part of the conference that can be easy to overlook: the value of simply being together in person. Russell met new people, shared lunch, visited vendor tables and left with ideas for future stories. After years in which virtual meetings became routine, he felt there was something meaningful about occupying the same physical space again.
As a vegetarian who was also avoiding dairy at the time, Russell arrived unsure what lunch would offer. Instead, he remembered thinking, “I have more than I can possibly eat here.” Community often happens through those small details, he noted. People talked between workshops. They shared food. They discovered a new organization at a vendor table. They heard someone articulate an experience that they had previously felt was private.
After WEAVE, Russell described the conference to a straight friend and mentioned some of the barriers LGBTQ+ people can encounter in addiction treatment. The friend’s response was essentially: What barriers? She had never considered them. “The general population has no idea,” Russell told the organizers, explaining why he felt it was important to bring the conference to a wider audience. For those already immersed in LGBTQ+ recovery communities, the relationship between identity, stigma, access and treatment may feel obvious. For others, those connections remain largely invisible. A conference can help make them visible at a moment when many communities are experiencing significant mental health strain.
“I think it’s an opportunity to be in a position to bring this work to New Jersey,” Lopez said, emphasizing the importance of working with partners and stakeholders across the state to move WEAVE beyond being a single successful conference. It becomes part of a broader conversation about what LGBTQ+ recovery infrastructure in New Jersey might become if peer specialists, clinicians, community organizations, advocates, and people with lived experience continue building it together.
“We’re just trying to build a bigger boat,” MacDonald said. For her, working alongside NJ-CARS and organizations centered on lived experience was part of expanding who gets included in recovery conversations. “We are really hoping that the next one is going to be even better,” she added.
A few weeks after WEAVE, Ramirez presented his workshop on queer nervous systems and addiction during a “recovery camp” at Easton Mountain, which is located in Greenwich, New York, and hosts retreats and educational and recreational events.
Easton Mountain was another space where queer people gathered to talk about recovery, relationships, sexuality, loneliness, connection and what it means to build a life in recovery. The settings were different, but the movement underneath them felt connected. Queer recovery is happening in treatment programs, peer spaces, mutual-aid groups, community organizations, conferences, camps, and everyday conversations
WEAVE gave that movement a useful framework: “Wholeness” means making room for the whole person. “Empowerment” means recognizing lived experience as knowledge. “Action” means moving beyond simply identifying barriers. “Vision” means imagining recovery spaces that are more responsive to the communities they serve. “Equity” means paying attention to who can actually access those spaces.
MacDonald’s call to build a bigger boat and Lopez’s emphasis on collaboration point in the same direction: no single organization, profession or recovery pathway can work alone. New Jersey’s first conference created a place for those different voices to meet. The work now is to keep weaving them together.
Resources / Learn More
New Jersey Coalition for Addiction Recovery Support (NJ-CARS)
https://nj-cars.org/
Garden State Equality
https://www.gardenstateequality.org/
Easton Mountain Recovery Camp
https://www.eastonmountain.org/
Visit Easton Mountain’s website for current Recovery Camp information and programming.
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