Drug recovery residence mulled
Poulsbo city council receives proposal for Nelson House as location
The concept at the core of recovery residences isn’t new to Kitsap as there are three such residences in the county, and the Nelson House location previously performed a similar service for youth through the nonprofit Coffee Oasis.
A social worker and a police officer were there to greet Nick Bollinger when he walked out of his 90-day stay in a drug treatment center.
“‘Are you ready to start your new journey?’” Bollinger remembers being asked. “I was like, ‘Heck yeah, let’s go!”
Bollinger had been living in a “bad situation,” as he put it. He had become addicted to drugs, occasionally selling them too, and was sleeping on the street, in his car, in tents and staying in various trap houses. His situation had gotten so problematic that his daughter reached out to him for the first time in four years and helped him get into a treatment program.
The social worker and police officer drove him to a Hand Up Housing recovery residence in Edmonds – a house with space for 19 men who were all on a similar path to recovery who needed a communal and supportive environment to embolden their journey.
Soon, a similar recovery residence could be established in Poulsbo. Kim Hendrickson, who is part of a recovery housing work group and Poulsbo’s housing, health and human services director, presented the Nelson House to the Poulsbo City Council last week as a favorable location to implement the project.
“As fentanyl continues to poison our drug supply, in Kitsap and Washington, nationwide, and overdose deaths continue to increase on a steady and really dramatic basis, I feel like it’s life or death,” Hendrickson said. “If we can work with people and support their recovery and put them in a safe living environment, we are literally saving lives.”
A familiar concept
Recovery residences are for people like Bollinger who have just exited an inpatient program or who
have come out of detox and are ready to live a drug- and alcohol-free life, and take on responsibilities that will prop them up for a transition into independent living, Hendrickson said.
“All of these recovery residences have a peer, somebody that’s been through the recovery process that lives in the house and serves as that anchor for other residents,” Hendrickson said. “They have somebody to talk to, somebody that leads groups in the house, somebody to go to if they’re struggling with recovery.”
The proposed recovery residence would serve four or five women recovering from substance abuse and house an advisory peer as well. Residents would be able to stay at the house for about two years, and during that time, could receive assistance with obtaining treatment and support services and transitioning into permanent housing along the continuum of care, Hendrickson said. Residents would be expected to pay rent after a free onboarding period and would be tasked with caretaking at Nelson Park.
Tom Fay, CEO of Gambit Recovery, which operates sober living homes in Arizona, California, Missouri, accompanied Hendrickson at the February 14 meeting. Fay told the Council that ideally, residents would have 30 to 90 days of sobriety under their belt and would be enrolled in an intensive outpatient program while at the recovery residence. A residence run by Gambit Recovery would be highly structured and residents would have to pass a drug test and breathalyzer, and be evaluated with a background check and their ability to pay rent.
Hendrickson and her peers have been pursuing a recovery residence for a while, forming the recovery housing work group, to explore ideas. Their work brought them to Everett to tour one of Hand Up Housing’s recovery residences like Bollinger’s, where they found a lot of inspiration.
The concept at the core of recovery residences isn’t new to Kitsap though, as there are three such residences in the county, and the Nelson House location previously performed a similar service for youth through the nonprofit Coffee Oasis.
Bollinger’s recovery residence in Edmonds and the former Nelson House required about $300 in rent per month and residents would share a bedroom, participating in a collective recovery environment, for about a year and a half. Beginning in 2017, the Nelson House served four women aged 18 to 25 yearsold at a time overseen by a resident advisor, said Jeri Delaney, area director of youth programs Kitsap for the Coffee Oasis. The former Nelson House did not, however, have a focus on substance use treatment and recovery like its new iteration would.
The recovery housing work group came across the Nelson House in January after the Coffee Oasis decided not to renew its lease with the City of Poulsbo, after the program found difficulty filling its resident advisor position in the home.
The last two women who were living at the Nelson House before the Coffee Oasis ended their lease were successfully transitioned to new housing, Hendrickson told the Council, when asked.
“It was just a really nice opportunity to present council with a real opportunity for doing this thing that we’ve been discussing on a more abstract basis for the past few months,” Hendrickson said. “An opportunity has presented itself to actually try out a recovery residence.”
A supportive environment for recovery
The recovery residence concept hinges on peer support.
When Bollinger was on his own, he tried to get sober solo – it never worked. He’d been resistant to attending A.A. meetings, never had a sponsor, and only had two friends that he could trust. They wrote him letters and sent him cigarettes while he was at treatment, but they were users themselves. Bollinger didn’t have a support group he could
lean on until he got a bed at his recovery residence.
“If somebody is actually willing to take that step and start a recovery program, but then we’re expecting them to go back into a tent and stay clean while they’re surrounded by other people that are using…we’re fooling ourselves,” Hendrickson said. It’s hard enough to get started… So the two things that seem to be indispensable is having a safe and stable place to live and a community around you that supports your sobriety.”
Hendrickson has also been involved with facilitating Poulsbo’s North Kitsap Recovery Resource Center, which has been open for about three months now. Visitors to the center can access peer support, nursing, substance and mental health assistance and counseling, amenities and medications for opioid and alcohol use disorders for free. As visitors trickle in and the resource center gathers momentum, Hendrickson and the center staff have noticed a pattern.
Though there are some unhoused people coming in to use the center resources, a majority of the visitors are housed in some form or another, Hendrickson said. “Even within that housed population, there’s still such a need for housing that is more conducive for recovery.”
Hendrickson hopes that the resource center would be able to refer its clients directly to the recovery residence so that those tenants are already set up with mental health, substance use disorder, nursing and telehealth services.
“Without support in place to peers or community resources, people go right back to using because they’re not set up for success,” Hendrickson said. “Having a recovery house… to develop more skills and connections to live in a permanent housing situation where they can live independently with a different kind of lifestyle is just incredibly important.”
Bollinger first arrived at his recovery residence during the COVID-19 pandemic, and though there were only about 12 tenants there, he was nervous and intimidated upon arrival. It wasn’t until he began attending A.A. meetings that were hosted inside the house at the time, that he began to loosen up as he watched everyone else sharing and talking.
Bollinger’s residence requires its residents to attend three A.A. or N.A. meetings a week outside of the home, and everyone gathers for a Saturday meeting to create and discuss goals for the week, such as getting a driver’s license.
“Our houses are awesome, I know they saved my life and I’ve been clean now for four years,” Bollinger said. “I just followed through with my treatment and got a job and I am doing really good.”
Developing soft skills and
responsibility
After spending a year and a half in the house as a resident, Bollinger moved on to become a house manager, similar to a resident advisor, as well as Hand Up Housing’s housing coordinator. He currently manages the 19-man house he stayed in four years ago.
“I ended up being a leader of men and people looked up to me,” Bollinger said. “Being a manager has taught me a lot, mainly how to deal with other people. You see so many people come through, and not all of them make it, but I’ve learned to celebrate their highs and their goals that they’ve achieved and been there to support them when they’re down too.”
Another mission of a recovery residence is to foster responsibility by building vocational, communication and money management skills.
“The idea is that the people are working that live in the house and they’re paying rent to stay in the house,” Hendrickson said of the residents who would be required to caretake for Nelson park. “It becomes a real commitment and something that residents take seriously... It’s something that you work for and you pay for.”
It might cost $600 to $800 to be a part of a shared room, Hendrickson said, but upkeeping Nelson Park would just be a start to residents’ job expectations. Hendrickson hopes the project will be able to partner with a provider that can offer tenants additional vocational opportunities, as “we live in a county that has such a heavy predominance of trades.”
The Coffee Oasis required former Nelson House residents to work eight hours in the park and offered job training classes and a 100-hour internship at a local business.
“The problem isn’t that (the young residents) can’t get jobs, often, they can’t keep them just because they haven’t been taught the soft skills that are necessary to maintain a job, like overcoming conflict resolution with bosses, little quirks that just haven’t been taught to them,” Delaney said. “They’re able to kind of work through some of the issues that they might have had in previous work experiences and able to do it in a safe environment where they weren’t going to get fired.”
Paying rent and working for it helped the former Nelson House women manage their money, Delaney said, and living in close quarters with others helped teach the residents “mutual respect. Many of the women had come from shelters and had to learn how to negotiate, build interpersonal relationships, clean up after themselves and communicate effectively.
By the time the former Nelson House closed its doors, 94 women had gone through the program and 76 had transitioned into transitional housing, reported the Coffee Oasis. Some of the women moved into housing together as roommates, some moved in with partners and some reconciled with their families and were able to move back home, Delaney said.
The green light forward
Hendrickson hopes the convenience of the Nelson House will make the recovery residence concept more attractive to the council members, as it requires no acquisition, mortgage or rent because it is a City-owned property. The Nelson House is also already furnished having served as shared housing already.
The residence would even “make a bit of a profit each month,” Hendrickson told the Council. “So it’s not only selfsustainable, but there’s revenue that’s coming in every month that either can be used to support that house, or maybe a different house that we have in Poulsbo.”
Though Hendrickson’s presentation at the February 14 meeting was just informational, council members expressed interest in seeing the recovery residence idea forward.
Councilman Gary McVey supported seeing the concept forward and asked if there would be any community meeting set up to inform nearby-residents and park-goers about a potential recovery residence. “Part of that is just to uncover any potential bumps in the road, but the other part of it is realizing that if these individuals are going to need jobs and additional support and so forth, and you’re going to be out working in the park, having some more community buy-in can be helpful.”
Having gotten the green light, Hendrickson plans to return to the council on March 6 with more details such as legal information, financial information on the bidding process for a provider to run the recovery house, how revenue would be generated and where it would go, and contract language on the kind of background checks residents would be subjected to. It will then be up to the Council whether or not to vote on the matter during their March 13 meeting.
Hendrickson hopes to establish the recovery residence in the Nelson House in time for Spring when the weather warms and Nelson Park will be in need of caretakers, but the mission won’t stop there.
“Clearly, we need more recovery residents than five spots in Poulsbo,” Hendrickson said. “There’s such a shortage of recovery housing in the county that this will be a nice start, but it would have to be looked at as just a beginning. It’s very, very small scale, but I think it’s really important to show that Poulsbo can do this, and if Poulsbo can do this, then others can do it too.”