About this Sober House
Oakwood Home for Women is a women's recovery home on Highland Avenue in Shreveport, Louisiana, the seat of Caddo Parish. It has housed women recovering from alcoholism and addiction since 1974, which makes it one of the oldest continuously operating recovery residences in the state, and it is built around the twelve steps of Alcoholics Anonymous.
A Women's Recovery Home in the Highland District
Highland Avenue runs through the Highland historic district just south of downtown Shreveport, a neighborhood of early twentieth century houses on a grid of shaded streets. The address is close to almost everything a resident needs. Downtown Shreveport, the Caddo Parish Courthouse, Ochsner LSU Health Shreveport and the outpatient providers around it are within a mile or two, and SporTran bus routes run the Line Avenue and Kings Highway corridors. A woman without a car can keep appointments and hold a job from this part of the city.
Fifty Years of Recovery Housing in Shreveport
The home opened in 1974. Longevity on that scale is the single most informative fact on this listing, because recovery housing turns over constantly and most houses do not last five years. An organization that has taken women in for five decades has survived funding gaps, staff changes and every shift in how addiction is understood and treated. It also means the alumni network in northwest Louisiana is deep. A woman moving in here joins something that has been running since before most of the treatment system around it existed.
What It Costs to Live in This Recovery Residence
Residents pay a nominal fee for room and board if they are able to pay, and no woman is turned away because she cannot. That is a materially different model from a market-rate sober house, and it changes who can walk through the door. A woman leaving a jail term, a detox unit or an abusive household with no money and no job usually has no options at a market-rate weekly rate, and a home operating on this basis is often the only realistic address available to her in the region.
The Twelve Steps as the House Program
Residents learn and work the twelve steps of Alcoholics Anonymous, with support from other residents and from volunteers. There is no clinical staff. The recovery work is peer-led and step-based, which is a defined and demanding model with a century of practice behind it. Women who want a clinical program should look at a licensed treatment setting; women who want to be surrounded by others working the steps in a house where that is the whole point are the intended residents. Louisiana's Department of Health maintains the directory of licensed treatment providers for anyone who needs both.
Certification and Recovery Housing in Louisiana
Louisiana does not license or register recovery residences, and no public directory of certified homes exists. Certification through the Louisiana Association of Recovery Residences is voluntary, and the association says plainly that it is not a licensing authority. In a state with nothing to look up, a fifty-year operating history in one city functions as the kind of public record that certification is meant to create.
Women's Recovery Homes in Caddo Parish
Shreveport is the parish seat of Caddo Parish and the largest city in northwest Louisiana, and it serves a region that runs to the Texas and Arkansas lines. Women's recovery housing across the region is scarce, and a woman completing treatment in Bossier, DeSoto, Webster or Red River Parish frequently finds that Shreveport holds the only beds within an hour's drive. The city also holds the courts, the hospitals and the employers, so a resident here can meet obligations without leaving the parish.
