Valley Recovery hopes women’s detox center will help transform more lives

Redwood Family Center bent the rules for Heather Adams, who came to the residential drug treatment program in Modesto without any clean time.

She was thin. She wasn’t eating or sleeping. She was too messed up to watch her 2-year-old son, prompting the Redwood staff to suggest putting him in foster care for a while.

The first time she was told to take a bus to activities outside the center, she replied, “I’m not taking a bus” and retreated to her room.

“I had to force myself to start living without drugs,” said Adams, who has been clean for more than five years. “I basically had to start being a parent.”

For many years, Redwood Family Center has provided addicted mothers with a chance to live healthy, sober lives. Many of the women come off the streets and need a safe place to work on sobriety and complete steps to be reunited with their children placed in foster care.

The nonprofit Valley Recovery Resources rescued the Redwood centers from a crisis in 2011 by forging a private-public partnership with the county, which could no longer afford a local match for federal funding for services.

The two Redwood centers – on Corson Avenue and on California Avenue in Modesto, with capacity for 50 women and their children – are a bright spot in a county that struggles to break cycles of addiction and crime and, like most communities, faces a rising tide of opioid addiction. Its parent organization, Valley Recovery, has four graduate homes to help recovered clients transition to living on their own.

To complete the loop, Valley Recovery wants to create a 30-day residential center for women who need detox and counseling as a first step on the road of recovery.

Steve Berkowitz, executive director of Valley Recovery, said it’s best for new clients to have a month of sobriety before entering the highly structured Redwood program.

Berkowitz said there are limited resources in Stanislaus County for women needing to safely withdraw from addictive drugs. The new 12-bed center would help clients with detoxification in a safe environment and include individual and group counseling.

The county’s Stanislaus Recovery Center has a 10-day rehab program for women, but the short program does not provide enough therapy for maintaining long-term sobriety, Berkowitz said.

County child welfare services has a contract for only a dozen detox beds for women.

The faith-based Valley Recovery is able to lease a site for the treatment center from CrossPoint Community Church and plans to seek a contract with Stanislaus County. The center would need about $500,000 in annual county funding, Berkowitz said.

Some clients could also use private insurance, scholarships or a sliding fee scale to pay for the services.

Valley Recovery is applying for a state license before bringing a proposal to the county.

Measuring success

County officials said they will have to look closely at the nonprofit’s proposal.

“We heard they had an interest in opening a program but I don’t know a lot about it,” said Christine Huber, an assistant director for the county’s Community Services Agency.

“We really value our partnership with Valley Recovery through the Redwood houses,” Huber said. “We would have to evaluate if (the new program) would match the needs of our families.”

County Supervisor Terry Withrow said he wants to hear more about the proposal.

“If it has potential that is great, but I would want to see data on their results,” Withrow said. “If we are going to commit some funds, we need to be about results-based accountability.”

The Redwood centers have assisted about 500 addicted mothers since 2011, many of whom have been separated from their kids by county Child Protective Services. Mothers reaching milestones in the program are granted visits with their children at Redwood and many families are eventually reunited. About 70 percent of clients complete what is usually a nine-month program, Berkowitz said.

It’s not practical for the voluntary program to track the sobriety of former clients over five years or more, he said.

Berkowitz, a former coordinator of Stanislaus Recovery Center, said that other data could measure the success of the Redwood program. He noted that Redwood’s recidivism rate, or the number of repeat clients, is less than 1 percent. But child welfare services may have better data on how many former clients have repeated cases with CPS.

“Does it get them out of the child welfare system?” Berkowitz asked.

Redwood’s structured environment enables the women to learn good parenting, household skills and relationship building. During the day, clients leave the center to attend groups, meet with counselors, work on their education or do volunteer work.

Some Redwood graduates become substance abuse counselors for programs such as the First Step Perinatal Program in Modesto.

Teresa Mendoza is a child care worker for First Step in the McHenry Village shopping center. She was addicted to meth and entered Redwood after a suicide attempt, she said.

“It gave me a safe place for getting clean,” said Mendoza, who has been drug-free for almost seven years.

She said her Christian faith was a big part of her recovery. Mendoza attends the Celebration Center on Kerr Avenue and helps teach growth classes. The church has outreach ministries and does a lot of evangelism, Mendoza said.

“I just really connected there,” she said.

Building a new life

Adams, who started using drugs after having a child at 16, said she wasn’t prepared to start the Redwood program. She could no longer pay for a motel room for her and her son, which meant they were facing life on the streets. She had lost two children to foster care and adoption, and didn’t want to part with her third child, she said.

She talked with a CPS staff member she had previously met, who got her into Redwood. Adams chafed at some of the rules, such as not having free use of her phone. She couldn’t take pictures of her son.

“Every month I would tell myself ‘I am leaving,’ until about a year into the program,” Adams said. “My perspective changed to keeping my son’s best interests in mind. I had to consider what would benefit him in the long run.”

Adams spent almost two years at Redwood, which did not have graduate houses then. The single mom moved to a sober home, where tenants were not entirely sober. She kept the door to her room shut and had her son watch a lot of cartoons.

By then, Adams was determined to build a new life. Each morning at 7 a.m., she took a long walk to a bus stop and rode transit from Oakdale to Modesto Junior College. She repeated the daily routine until she was able to buy a used car.

Adams married a man she met in recovery who helps with parenting her son, who is now 7 years old. Last year, her husband was laid off and the small family slept in churches that participate in Family Promise, a network that helps homeless families. Her husband now works as a heating-system installer and they rent a home near MJC.

With a goal of being a social worker, Adams plans to finish studies at MJC in April and transfer to California State University, Stanislaus.

She agreed there’s a need for more services for women who want to break addictions.

“I was not the only person out there who wanted to get clean,” Adams said.

For a 2013 article on Redwood, The Modesto Bee interviewed a group of six clients. Four of the women are clean and sober today. Another woman was arrested three months after the story was published. No information was available for the other client, who was then in recovery for a third time.

Patricia Johnson, 35, most likely qualifies as one of the center’s “miracle stories.” The former addict was living in a tent with homeless people near the Tuolumne River before she came to Redwood.

In 2013, Johnson had completed the recovery program and lived in Section 8 housing, recycling cans to earn money to supplement $300 a month in welfare. She said this month the Public Defenders office helped with getting her criminal record expunged. She is working as a nursing assistant and got married in December.

“I have a career now,” Johnson said. “I can show my children I am more than what I was and know how to overcome many battles.”

This story was originally published February 25, 2017 at 4:29 PM with the headline "Valley Recovery hopes women’s detox center will help transform more lives."