The Serenity Center 
Audrey Robbins Volunteer Team of the Year

Volunteers are the reason there is a quiet place at 9650 Basket Ring Road near Oakland Mills Village Center where up to 400 troubled individuals come each week and find a place with the support and self-help tools to recover from addiction, abuse, personal and mental health issues.  The Serenity Center’s unassuming building is currently home to seventeen recovery groups holding close to fifty meetings a month.  The groups range from multiple and multi-lingual chapters of Alcoholics Anonymous and Al-Anon to Debtors Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous and Survivors of Incest Anonymous.  Each offers its members a safe haven, confidentiality, and an opportunity to find strategies and paths to recovery with the life-wrenching issues with which they are dealing.  The Center was founded by recovering alcoholics and today is an all-volunteer operation, with no paid staff.  Volunteers handle office operations, raise funds, manage the schedules and ensure the Center continues. Because of their personal experiences in recovery, these dedicated volunteers bring both a clear-eyed recognition of the needs of addicts, and those who have suffered abuse, and, after 16 years of operation, a practical understanding of what it takes to operate effectively. 

The TSC’s volunteer team take their commitment to self-help seriously.  Recovery meetings, in addition to offering a welcoming and secure environment, are facilitated by volunteers.  All meetings are open to the public, though some are limited to those dealing with specific areas of recovery. According to Volunteer Manager Frank Turban, “Recovery is a funny thing.  [People] have loyalty to the program where [their] recovery started – they want to help that place.

The majority of The Serenity Center’s funding is from private donations.  Incorporated in 1993, it first operation was in rental space in Kings Contrivance, and then in 2004 the group was able to purchase its present building. This building and the team of volunteers who make its operation possible  provide a quite service to the community that reverberates loudly in the lives it helps.