First, you will need to systematically evaluate your current state as well as your vision for your sober living home in the future. This includes identifying priorities, organizational processes, and necessary resources to meet the needs of staff and residents. If you are an individual or a group who would like to start a sober living home in your community, Eudaimonia Recovery Homes is here to help.

A sober living home is a safe, substance-free residency for people in recovery. Recovery Housing reduces the chances of relapse because possible triggers don’t surround people the way they would if they’d returned home immediately following treatment. Because these triggers aren’t present, you can continue working your program and practicing the coping skills you learned while in treatment. Recovery Housing acts as a buffer making the transition smoother because they understand that sober living is a path you’ll be on for the rest of your life.

A Brief History of Sober Housing

To keep residents safe, all successful sober homes have rules and regulations that you’re required to follow. While rules may vary, we’re https://www.healthworkscollective.com/how-choose-sober-house-tips-to-focus-on/ going to discuss the general guidelines most homes require. To succeed in your recovery, it’s important that you abide by them.

You may feel confident doing this on your own or you may want to consider hiring an accountant to handle your filing system to avoid any legal issues in the future. As stronger and stronger evidence emerges of the value of community and connection as drivers of recovery, I hope we see more of this kind of practice and research in the U.K. Mutual accountability was sober house “an important driver of behavior” with a sense of responsibility for others being highlighted as key. This struck me as being very similar to living in a therapeutic community model of rehab. Stigma and shame became less powerful [in sober living], and the group looked out for each other. If they leave too early, their chances of relapsing increase significantly.

The Challenges of Sober Living Houses

Also like other SLH models, each house has a house manager who is responsible for ensuring house rules and requirements are followed. ORS does not have any type of Residents Council, but house managers meet regularly with the executive director and have input into operation of the SLHs in during these contacts. Sober living homes are places where people in recovery can live for a while, typically after an inpatient treatment program. The hope is that with a period of extra support at a substance abuse halfway house or other sober living home, residents will learn the skills to be self-sufficient and maintain sobriety on their own. It’s easy to confuse sober living houses with rehab centers or halfway houses, but there are some stark differences among them. Rehab centers offer intensive recovery programs that help residents overcome addictions by following strict rules and regulations.

Communities and addiction treatment systems should therefore carefully assess the types of recovery housing that might be most helpful to their communities. Make a business plan to identify your goals and streamline the process of opening your sober living home. You will also want to study and analyze any other sober living homes nearby to determine what works (and what doesn’t work) and determine how you will make your sober living home stand out from the competition. Even people who are highly motivated and committed to staying sober often struggle in early sobriety if they don’t have the right support.

How to Promote and Market Your Sober Living Home

We also include a discussion of our plans to study the community context of SLHs, which will depict how stakeholder influences support and hinder their operations and potential for expansion. The study design used repeated measures analyses to test how study measures varied over time. Because the two types of houses served residents with different demographic characteristics, we conducted disaggregated longitudinal analyses for each. For a more complete description of the study design and collection of data see Polcin et al. (2010), Polcin et al. (in press) and Polcin, Korcha, Bond, Galloway and Lapp (in press). If you’re ready to start a sober living home of your own, consider joining the exceptional Eudaimonia team. Our Sober Living Manager app is available on the Apple Store and Google Store.

• Today, sober houses are “free-standing,” independently owned and operated.
• This Recovery Review post is by David McCartney, who is an addiction medicine specialist and Clinical Lead at LEAP, a quasi-residential therapeutic community addiction treatment program in Scotland.