Ashley McElwee was presented with Westside Together’s (WST) Best of the West Award (BOWA) at the Westside Champions Celebration on Dec. 9. Ashley is a Peer Recovery Support Specialist (PRSS) and PEERS Manager with West Virginia Sober Living (WVSL).
Elizabeth “Liz” Neal, who also works at WVSL, introduced Ashley to the crowd at the Champions Celebration. Liz described Ashley as a dedicated community advocate who holds a passion for turning ideas into action, often taking charge when she sees something that needs changed.
Ashley’s efforts have not gone unnoticed by the community, as demonstrated in the 23 nominations she received for WST’s BOWA. Each nomination included comments recognizing her impact in Charleston and on the West Side: being at various local events, leading discussions on the use of opioid settlement funds, volunteering for SOAR WV, having unconditional love for everyone she meets, and more acts of care.
Professionally, Ashley works at the WVSL Solutions office located on Tennessee Avenue on the West Side. She describes the office as a drop-in center where staff support some of Charleston’s most vulnerable populations.
“People who are unhoused, are in active substance use, have mental health struggles, just people who tend to slip through the cracks and face a lot of stigma,” Ashley says. “We get to work with them, and it’s been incredibly meaningful.”
Part of Ashley’s passion for helping others comes from her own lived experience of the journey to recovery. She grew up outside of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and spent summers in West Virginia with family who lived in Randolph County. She looks back on her younger years in the Mountain State as happy childhood memories. Later on, when Ashley went to college at 18, she began drinking and using substances for the first time – and her use escalated quickly.
“From the get-go, I was like: ‘Yep, this is it. This is what I’ve been missing,’ and the next decade and some change was spent in active use,” Ashley says. “[It was] completely chaotic, in and out of ERs, jails, institutions, and things kept getting worse.”
In 2019, Ashley was incarcerated in Colorado, an experience that she says strained her relationship with family. She reached out to her mom who was in Randolph County at the time, telling her, “I don’t have a plan for when I get out of here, but I want to do something different.” Ashley’s mom told her she could come to West Virginia to get a fresh start.
Ashley’s first couple of months in West Virginia were spent in active use, but along the way, she met supportive people in the recovery community who encouraged her to want different for herself. A PRSS in Fayetteville helped her get into treatment at St. Francis Hospital in Charleston, where she stayed for 28 days. The staff there recommended that Ashley pursue long-term help, and she went on to spend almost one year at Recovery Point West Virginia.
After that, Ashley became a resident at WVSL. Over the next year and a half, she learned how to be accountable, pay bills, and handle other responsibilities, something she says she had not done for years prior. Sober living is also where she first met her friend and now co-worker, Liz Neal, just one of the many cherished life connections she made during her sobriety journey.
“So that experience, like the whole thing when I look back, every person I met along the way has helped me to be where I am today,” Ashley says. “Because seven years ago this time, I didn’t think that I was going to make it another year. So, this is just completely incredible, and I’m so grateful. I found my people here.”
Now, as a resident of Charleston’s West Side, Ashley continues to build those meaningful life connections. When she accepted the BOWA at the Champions Celebration, she told the crowd that the West Side community saved her life. Later elaborating on that statement in an interview, she reflected on the gas crisis that affected the neighborhood in 2023. She says residents took quick action to solve problems and help one another without expecting anything in return.
“That was so inspiring and informative for me because I had not experienced that anywhere else but here,” Ashley says. “I’m sure it exists in other places, but the sense of community I got from here, from Charleston, from the West Side, was unique. The people that I’ve met have shown me that, like, if there is something that’s wrong, no one else is going to step in and do anything about it unless you do, and I really took that to heart.”
Ashley stresses how much of an honor it is to live and work alongside those on the West Side. She points to people such as Dr. Shanequa Smith, also a BOWA recipient, along with Seth King, Sarah Stone, and others, as role models working to strengthen the community. Ashley says she is grateful to be part of the work, emphasizing that it is a collective effort. She compares the West Side to a quote by Mister Rogers, a well-known television personality who often said, “Always look for the helpers. There will always be helpers.”
“I’d like to think of it as like being about the West Side, actually, because there are so many people who want to help each other,” Ashley explains.
One of Ashley’s hopes for 2026 is increased access to housing for people in recovery, justice-impacted individuals, and those recently released from incarceration. She would also like to see more concentrated efforts against combating the stigma surrounding harm reduction.
“That’s something that I get passionate about because harm reduction, like, it’s a radical expression of love for people,” Ashley says. “You deserve health, safety and respect no matter where you’re at in life, but also it’s evidence-based practice.”
Ashley says if more people acknowledged that ignoring problems does not make them disappear – and that everyone wants a safe, meaningful life – Charleston as a whole could make significant strides in reducing harm reduction stigma.
