Rhubarb Farm – The Third Space has become Derbyshire’s first known CLERO-accredited Lived Experience Recovery Organisation (LERO), marking an important moment for the county’s recovery community.
The accreditation reflects a commitment to lived experience-led recovery and supports the wider ambition to strengthen and grow LEROs across Derbyshire.
To mark this achievement, Ben Sofield has written a short reflective piece exploring his journey to CLERO accreditation and the importance of lived experience in helping people build and sustain recovery.
I always felt like I’m blessed with a curse.
Which all sounds very dramatic, doesn’t it? Like I should be stood on a cliff edge in a long coat and staring into the rain, but that is genuinely how I see my addiction.
For clarity – obviously, I wouldn’t recommend it – 0/10 would not tell a friend (liver damage, seizures, psychosis, shame, chaos and ruining your own life is not the one).
But… Because I went through it, because I escaped the madness and crawled out the other side still alive, albeit a bit scarred, I can now sit with someone who is right in the middle of it and say:
“Yeah, I know.” And not in a textbook way or in a “have you tried taking a bath?” way but in a “I’ve done the exact same thing” kinda way.
When I first got better, all I wanted to do was use the pain for something decent, I didn’t want it to just be wreckage. I wanted it to become compost. Which is very Rhubarb Farm of me. Take the rotten stuff, turn it over, let something grow.
Rhubarb Farm is a community farm in Langwith that uses gardening, nature, meaningful work and connection to support people with recovery, mental health, learning disabilities, isolation and/or whatever else life can throw at you.
After starting at Rhubarb Farm on a placement (for my addiction) I eventually, I found myself working in recovery. Me. That lad who once thought “this is fine” while absolutely none of it was fine.
In 2024, I was running the Recovery Project at Rhubarb Farm, helping people, building groups, doing the thing I had dreamed of doing when I was still shaking and scared and wondering whether I’d properly broken myself this time.
That’s when the imposter syndrome arrived. This lasted for about a year.
“What are you doing?” “Why are you doing this?” “Who do you think you are?” “Shouldn’t you leave this to the professionals?”
In 2025 I went to Derbyshire County Council’s LERO roadshows, run by Recovery Connections, and heard the term properly: LERO. Lived Experience Recovery Organisation and something clicked. Not a small click, like an earth shattering rumble.
A LERO is an organisation led by people with lived experience of addiction and recovery. It says that what we carry isn’t just baggage but rather its knowledge and its evidence, that we do recover.
It is not the whole system, no, but it is a needed cog in the machine of recovery, and for the first time, I began to understand that maybe I wasn’t blagging it. Maybe I was exactly where I was meant to be.
The Third Space grew from that same feeling. People were being referred to Rhubarb Farm who needed somewhere warm, welcoming, non-clinical and not entirely dependent on British weather behaving itself. Not everyone wants to heal in a field during sideways rain (I wonder why not?)
So, we built The Third Space: a room full of people just trying to be a bit better and as if by magic – along came CLERO — the College of Lived Experience Recovery Organisations.
I cannot overstate how much they helped me stop feeling like a worthless ex-addict.
Through CLERO, I found language for what we were already doing and a sense that there were others across the country trying to build the same sort of thing: authentic, peer-led, community-rooted recovery spaces where lived experience isn’t the decoration on top, it’s the foundation underneath.
In a separately funded project, The LERO Capacity Funded Project, CLERO introduced me to, I enrolled on the LERO Leadership Course which helped me see myself differently, and peer mentoring helped me stay steady when my confidence started doing that weird little disappearing act it likes to do.
CLERO also connected me into wider work, including a research project with the University of Birmingham, which still makes me laugh because I can barely organise my own socks and yet, I’m involved in research. Madness.
This all sits within a bigger national picture too. Dame Carol Black’s work, and the Government’s ‘From Harm to Hope’ strategy, helped shine a light on what many of us already knew in our bones: recovery is not just treatment appointments and discharge forms.
Rhubarb Farm and The Third Space have been formally recognised as a LERO and certified members of CLERO
For anyone out there trying to build a LERO and wondering if they’re qualified enough, polished enough, clever enough, professional enough – DO IT ANYWAY, remember, lived experience is not a consolation prize, it is not “less than.” It is a different kind of expertise, and when it is held safely, supported properly and rooted in community, it can change lives.
The road to CLERO was never just about certification. It was about realising that the curse had become useful and somehow, against all odds, something grew.