About this Sober House
A Hand Up is a co-ed recovery residence in Lewiston, Maine, for adults in recovery who are coming out of incarceration. It sits on Bartlett Street in Androscoggin County, and it opened on 1 August 2022.
Who A Hand Up Serves
The house serves people with substance use disorders who are transitioning out of incarceration. It takes both men and women: the building is split into a men's side and a women's side, with a communal kitchen and dining space between them.
That population is one of the hardest to house in Maine. Release dates arrive whether or not a bed exists; landlords screen on criminal records; and the first weeks after release are when the risk of overdose is at its highest. A recovery-focused reentry house is the specific answer to that gap — not a halfway house run by the corrections system, but a recovery residence whose residents happen to be coming from jail or prison.
The House on Bartlett Street
The building has had two previous lives. It was a funeral home, then a boarding house, and it was converted into a recovery home before opening in August 2022. The conversion kept the communal heart of the boarding house: the kitchen and dining space that separates the men's and women's units, and meeting and games spaces downstairs in the basement. The property itself is owned by Able Management, with A Hand Up running the residence inside it.
Shared space of that kind is not incidental to the model. The organization's founders describe what residents find in the house as community, along with structure and accountability — and community, in a house like this one, is largely a function of whether there is anywhere for people to sit down together.
Recovery and Reentry in Lewiston
A Hand Up is a recovery-focused reentry home, and it was described in the local press at its opening as one step toward meeting the demand for sober living residences in the Lewiston area. The house runs its own programming on site and works with outside service providers.
The organization behind it, formerly called Fresh Out, runs several houses. A sister company, Second Chances, operates further recovery and reentry residences in the Lewiston area, in Sabattus and in Augusta. The people who founded A Hand Up are also involved in other recovery organizations in the region, including the Augusta Recovery Re-entry Center and the Maine Reentry Network, which are separate organizations from this house.
Sober Living in Androscoggin County
Lewiston is the largest city in Androscoggin County and the service center for a wide stretch of central Maine, with Auburn immediately across the Androscoggin River. It holds hospitals, a district court, probation offices, treatment providers and the largest concentration of employers between Portland and Bangor — which is precisely why a reentry-focused recovery house belongs here rather than in a quieter town.
For someone being released with a Lewiston address to return to, the practical questions are all local: where to report, where to work, where to get a prescription filled, where to find people in recovery. A residence in the city keeps those answers within reach.
What a Stay Involves
A Hand Up is a shared house, and living there means living communally: shared kitchen and dining space, shared meeting space, and a men's and women's side under one roof. The organization's stated model is community, structure and accountability, backed by on-site programming and partnerships with providers who can supply what the house itself does not.
Anyone considering a place should ask A Hand Up directly about how the house handles medication-assisted treatment, what the day-to-day expectations are, how referrals from a jail or a treatment program are arranged, and what support is available on site during the first weeks after release, when the need is greatest.
