A place to heal
Home to help women recover from addictions
Cape Breton’s first live-in therapeutic recovery home for women healing from addictions will open in January although the press will get a sneak peak Tuesday.
The home in Point Edward is known as the Hope Project and is a non-profit organization established by Dr. Laura Whyte, her husband Andrew and their friends and fellow collaborators Chelsea and Ethan Fenton.
The aim of the project is to free women from their addictions, to restore a sense of dignity and selfworth and to integrate their healing back into the community.
While Ethan Fenton describes the facility as being comparable to a Talbot House but for women, Chelsea Fenton says the Hope Project is the result of input from similarly styled homes across Canada, including Marguerite House in Halifax.
“It became evident early on that we would work with women and we wanted to do some type of work with women on a longerterm basis,” said Chelsea Fenton. “We’ve been exploring a few different models, a few different places that we want to base our program off of and we came up with this live-in recovery home idea of taking women and having them come and stay in the home and live there together and have full-time staff on with them.”
The recovery programs consist of individual coaching, group programs, skill development, work programs and maintenance therapy. The programs will run three to 12 months and there will be an emphasis on the 12-step program. It will be initially open to four or five women participating in a 12month program in 2018 and should be able to accommodate eight to 10 by 2019.
The Hope Project does have a faith-based element and has a partnership with Grace Fellow Church in Sydney Mines.
Margaret Nichols-MacAdam is the executive director of the project. She worked for the Cape Breton Health Authority in Addiction Services for 16 years.