How the Recovery Café Model Works
The Recovery Café is an alternative, therapeutic, supportive community founded on the truth that every human being is precious and worthy of love regardless of their earlier trauma, mental and emotional anguish, addictive behaviors, or past mistakes. Providing a beautiful, safe, warm, drug- and alcohol-free space and loving community to anchor Members (our most closely supported consumers) in the sustained recovery needed to gain and maintain access to housing, social and health services, healthy relationships, education, and employment is essential to this model.
Our model is referred to by the larger behavioral health community as a Recovery Oriented System of Care (ROSC). A ROSC meets people where they are on the recovery continuum, engages them in a lifetime of managing their health, focuses holistically on a person’s needs, and empowers them to build a life that realizes their full potential. This person-centered system of care supports individuals as they establish a healthy life and recognizes that we all need a meaningful sense of membership and belonging in community.
Traditionally, a person receives support when they are in crisis and finds that the support is removed once they begin to experience stability. That model of emergency intervention and abandonment sets one up for a roller-coaster existence which is not only cruel, in that it locks one into a cycle of intense suffering and failure, it is expensive, ineffective, and a waste of human potential. It is hopeful that many states are embracing a more effective and compassionate system of care.