Alumnus has spent life’s work supporting those in veterans, recovery communities

Maj. John Donovan has made a career out of using his own experiences to help others. The St. Cloud State University alumnus was instrumental in bringing the Veterans Resource Center to SCSU as well as starting the University’s Recovery Community.

Donovan earned his associate’s degree in general education from SCSU in 1985. Following graduation he joined the military, serving overseas in the U.S. Army. While stationed in Germany he took enough classes to earn a Bachelor of Elective Studies from St. Cloud State in 1988. Donovan was then able to parlay his bachelor’s degree into earning his master’s in counseling from Boston University’s overseas program. He then specialized in working with youth at Nürnberg American High School in Germany who were displaying signs and symptoms of substance use disorder, a field that has personal ties for Donovan. It was Donovan’s goal to help give people the chance to “make some course corrections” in their lives.

“I’m a person in longterm recovery. What that means to me is it's been almost 47 years since I've had a drink or a drug. And at that time I was sober about 12 years and wanted to pass on some of the lessons I had learned as a young person in recovery,” he said. “I think I had some things, some insight, some lived experiences that I could share with other young people who were maybe going down the same path.”

After finishing his active duty service in Germany, Donovan was then on individual ready reserve during the Gulf War. Following what he called his “standby” service, Donovan joined the New York National Guard, before transferring to the Minnesota National Guard when his father started experiencing some health issues. He applied for and was named an officer in December 2000, just nine months before the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. Donovan was then called up to active duty and stayed there for the next 18 years, serving two tours in Iraq as well as a peacekeeping mission to Bosnia. In total he served 27 years with the military, earning such recognitions as the Meritorious Service Medal, Army Accommodation Medal, Army Achievement Medal, Good Conduct Medal, Outstanding Military Volunteer Service Medal, Iraq Campaign Medal and the NATO Medal.

During Donovan’s service with the Minnesota National Guard, then-SCSU President Earl Potter reached out to him about starting a veterans task force.

“He said, ‘I want to put together a veterans task force because we've got a lot of soldiers that are returning from deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan. They're coming back to SCSU and I want to make sure that we have a better and friendly environment here,’” Donovan recalled.

Through the task force a number of proposals were put forward to the president and enacted, including the creation of SCSU’s Veterans Resource Center.

“I’m very proud of the fact that I played a role in helping to get that open,” Donovan said.

Following their mutual involvement in the veterans task force, then-SCSU staff member Jen Matzke approached Donovan about starting a recovery community at SCSU. After doing some research on other recovery communities throughout the U.S., SCSU had its own recovery support system.

“Jen was successful in getting a recovery community started here and then we were influential in bringing a recovery meeting on campus that was augmented by people who live in St. Cloud year-round,” Donovan said. “We were able to get that meeting started, and to the best of my knowledge that's still going today.”

As Donovan approached retiring from active duty in the military, he started to consider his next steps. They eventually led him to starting the Recovery Community Network.

“One of the things that we in the mental health field don't do very well and we in the substance use disorder field don't do very well is talk to one another. We're great at talking to patients and peers and clients — we’re not real good about sharing best practices with one another, and I sometimes refer to that as silos of excellence. A silo of excellence is an organization that's doing really great things within their silo, but no information is getting out of the silo,” he said. “We had a lot of silos of excellence in central Minnesota, so the Recovery Community Network was an idea born out of that to get these organizations together and share best practices, share information about recovery oriented activities, share information about healthy alternative activities that are going on in the community that can be shared by and experienced by people here on campus, people who live in the city of St. Cloud, people who are in the greater St. Cloud area.”

What started as a monthly meeting quickly took off and turned into a platform along with multiple events that kept growing. Recovery Community Network then became an official 501(c)(3) nonprofit just before the COVID-19 pandemic caused the world to quarantine. Being a mental health agency, the nonprofit was able to open in a limited capacity after a few months. The majority of its work was still remote, and the organization discovered that it could build up a database of people in recovery so it could check in with people as they navigated an unprecedented time in the world’s history.

“Research shows that this really simple interaction of checking in on somebody — ‘Hey, how's your recovery going? Anything going on? Anything you want to talk about today?’ — and then they would text back or call back. This little simple interaction of reaching out and making contact increases recovery rates significantly. So we were able to bring that online as well as online services meetings through Zoom,” Donovan said. “We had people who were homebound, we had people who were unable to get to recovery meetings, but now by building our resources there, we're like, ‘Hey, there's a recovery meeting that's going on in New Zealand right now. You can join it and here's the link.’ Suddenly people started to see that there's this 24/7 community of recovery.”

In his retirement, Donovan still manages to impact others. He authored the book “A Soldier’s Journey,” which is a collection of essays and articles on recovery he’s written over the years. He also hosts a monthly podcast and publishes an accompanying blog, "Veterans 4 Recovery.”

Donovan’s life’s work of supporting others led to him receiving the Alumni Service Award from SCSU in 2022.

“I was extremely honored. I’m a proud Husky and grew up on the south side of St. Cloud. I would go to football games at old Selke Field — my father would bring me there; he’d bring me to basketball games at Halenbeck Hall. I got to see my first concert at Halenbeck Hall — it was Bachman-Turner Overdrive. St. Cloud State is very fond to me,” he said. “My brother went here. My mother went here. My sister went here. My daughters have gone here. So it's very near and dear to us. Through the service work that I did on the veterans task force, with the veterans community here, with the recovery community here — somebody thought I was worthy of this award and they put my name in and I was quite humbled that I was selected.”

Donovan encouraged others to find the causes they’re passionate about and to strive to be well-rounded.

“Be bold. Be audacious. Get out of your comfort zone. If you're in the school of business, augment that with the arts — make sure that you have a well-rounded education,” he said. “It’s all of those things — broadening your horizons, learning about Shakespeare, becoming familiar with all these things that make us better citizens, make us more informed — and so I would encourage them to be bold and audacious.”