With the URRC’s women’s services expansion coming up on the horizon, you might be wondering why we’re expanding our program to include women now, after all this time. You might even be asking why we didn’t just include women from the beginning.
Good question.
There was actually a time, before our program even had a name, when it was a co-ed program. As you might imagine, there are some complications involved in running a housing program where men and women live together. Our very young organization (at the time still part of the First Methodist Church) simply wasn’t up to those challenges.
Since most of the clients we were seeing at the time were men and most of the constituency at the time were men, our leaders at the time elected to just make the program single-sex.
A lot has changed since then.
Not only have we been seeing more demand for women’s addiction recovery services, but there are fewer services available to provide supportive housing to women recovering from addiction.
But the need has been there for years; why make the change now? Well, after talking about it for a long time internally, the stars finally aligned this last year and we got a lead on a building adjacent to ours that was the perfect spot for us to expand the program. The right pieces came into place at the right time.
It’s something we’re very grateful for, and can’t wait to tell you more about it.
Photo credit: Giuseppe Milo (www.pixael.com) on Visualhunt / CC BY
