For the week of April 16 - 22, 2003

Reaching out
to the valley

New Life Outreach gives hope
to recovering addicts

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By GREGORY FOLEY
Express Staff Writer

When Hailey resident Teri Beck came out of treatment for alcohol addiction, she feared that she might experience a relapse when she returned home, where temptations to drink and use drugs abounded.

"It’s hard," she said. "It’s very hard if you return home and the people around you are drinking or doing drugs."

Teri Beck, co-director of New Life Outreach, right, discusses the details of a fundraising campaign for the nonprofit organization with her assistant Julie Brown, in the organization’s new office in central Hailey. New Life Outreach has moved into a residence and office formerly occupied by Our Place, a nonprofit organization that sought to provide safe shelter for teens. Express photo by David N. Seelig

Fortunately, Beck found ways to stay clean and sober, and today serves as the co-director of New Life Outreach, a nonprofit organization aimed at giving recovering addicts in the Wood River Valley a safe, healthy environment in which to rebuild their lives.

New Life Outreach is a faith-based organization that offers recovering addicts an opportunity to reside in one of two gender-specific homes—one in Bellevue and one in Hailey—where they can make a healthy transition into the community after time spent in jail or an addiction-treatment facility.

Susan Mann, executive director of New Life Outreach, developed the organization out of a Hailey-based support group she established in March 2001, called the "Serenity Group." With Beck as an active participant, the group met weekly in a Hailey church, encouraging the use of faith and spirituality to assist addicts on the road to recovery.

"It was very successful," Beck said. "But our goal all along was to create a clean-and-sober house."

More than a year after starting the support group, Mann in June 2002 established a transitional recovery house in Bellevue for men and women, and New Life Outreach was born.

Designed to accept up to eight residents, the Bellevue facility after several months was operating at capacity.

"This whole thing has just grown and grown," Beck said. "There is such a need for it in our community."

Earlier this year, after the closure of Our Place, a nonprofit organization operating at 301 First Ave. in Hailey, Mann proposed to the city of Hailey to take over the site to expand New Life Outreach. City Planning and Zoning commissioners approved the plan last month, and today Mann is overseeing two separate houses for recovering men and women.

Both houses—which are a form of halfway house—operate under a strict set of conditions. Residents must sign a contract which states that they will not use alcohol or drugs, or will be asked to leave the residence. They must acquire and start working a job within their first two weeks. They must observe curfews. And, they must pay for the majority of the costs of operating the house they live in, including rent and food costs.

"They have to be active in the program," said Julie Brown, organization assistant. "They have to be committed to changing their life and working on their sobriety."

In return, residents get a drug- and alcohol-free living space, the opportunity to attend support meetings and access to a full-time counselor. New Life Outreach provides its residents with relapse prevention programs and counseling, but does not offer full treatment services.

Residents in the New Life Outreach houses are either individuals who enter voluntarily after completing a treatment program or are required by a court to live in a halfway house setting after being incarcerated.

"It is a sad reality that people with substance abuse problems often find themselves on the wrong side of the law," Mann noted. "The majority of people in the Blaine County Jail are there at taxpayers’ expense due to alcohol and drug violations … When released from a jail sentence, these individuals often find themselves jobless, homeless, and/or alienated from family."

The Hailey residence is permitted to house four women and one counselor. It currently houses three women in recovery.

The Bellevue residence currently houses four men.

With the women-only house established in Hailey, Beck said the organization’s next goal is to raise funds to create a new, larger facility in the Wood River Valley that can serve as a long-term treatment center and transitional residence.

For more information on New Life Outreach, call Julie Brown at 578-3550.

 

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