Our Community
#thejourneycontinues
We are not a front line service and are not available 24 hours a day. If you need immediate help or support with addiction, please seek professional help from your doctor or local addictions service.
If you need somebody to talk to now, please click the button below to see a list of front line services, including 24-hour support.
Our Services
We want to see every person we work with reach their potential to find their place in society, start families of their own and enjoy independent life. Some will need a greater intervention than others, but we are always person-centric because each resident has their own story to tell, their own trauma, their own triggers and their own treatment.
We provide our residents with:
- Key working: offering emotional support and empowerment, Support with education and training, Help to secure and maintain employment
- Random drug and alcohol testing: to maintain a level of accountability, to ensure the safety of the community
- Structured house meetings: to encourage self-help and peer support, To set community goals and targets, To resolve issues and grievances
- Structure cleaning rota: Maintaining routine and shared responsibility, Maintaining the standard of living and the property
- Weekly group meetings: Following 12-step fellowship and/or church home groups for discipleship and learning
- Volunteering programme: This gives people a chance to get to know us before making a commitment - a gentler way for them to learn to trust us. Many join us at our community allotment in Reading.
The Difference We Make
We provide a community run, solutions-based approach to long-term addiction recovery. We do more than offer a safe place for people to live. We provide a supportive community based on peer-to-peer lived experience, with no end date for those we help - it's a community for life.
To retain sobriety we need to continue to heal emotionally. Healing is best achieved when we hear the truth which is delivered with care from peers who have been there themselves and can see what we can't. This is what creates real change.
- Socially: men witness change in each other; we carry the message of hope to the addict or alcoholic who still suffers.
- Emotionally: we work from a place of empathy and understanding. We’ve overcome these experiences ourselves and we don’t shy away from sharing our own stories. We learn to dialogue with our sadness. We help residents unravel their own answers.
- Community: we provide family sized homes of 2-3 people where relationships are stronger. We maintain the houses to a high standard. We don't want our residents to settle for second best.
- Accountability: We know that helping someone find their own answers is more powerful than us doing it for them. Drug testing brings accountability and our key worker - with lived experience - is an essential part of delivering this.
- Financially: We help people to face their fears and move into independent living where they are paying back into society and no longer needing to use old ways to survive.
- Prejudice: Those with a history of drug problems are heavily stigmatised and can often be discriminated against. Whilst we are a strong community that takes refuge in belonging together, we also take gentle steps to move away from the 'recovery bubble' to create new networks.
