Sober Curator Contributor – Philadelphia, PA
Founder of Swift Steps
Certified Peer Specialist, in recovery since 2016, fifteen years running budgets for the City of Philadelphia and the author of The Sober Swiftie for The Sober Curator. Jewels to everyone in the room.
Julianne had been in recovery since 2016 and had spent a lot of it feeling like she was performing it. The rooms that were supposed to help didn’t reflect her back. Then she stood in a stadium parking lot full of strangers trading bracelets and singing the same words, and realized it was the first place in years she hadn’t had to explain herself to anyone.
She’d already trained as a Certified Peer Specialist through the Pennsylvania Certification Board. She’d already spent years inside Philadelphia city government managing budgets for corrections, finance and public health. She’d already grown a TikTok to 21,000 followers making recovery content, and learned what people actually respond to when nobody is grading them. Swift Steps® is what happened when those three things ended up in one room. The Sober Swiftie column came after, once Blank Space Recovery and Swift Steps® were already up and running.
The first meeting was March 2024. Today it’s a community app, a meeting every day of the week, a fifty five week curriculum and a scholarship fund, all peer led and all built on the idea that healing is not one size fits all.