About this Recovery House
Outstretched Arms is a women's sober living home in Berkley, Michigan, in Oakland County. Berkley is a small city in the inner ring of suburbs north of Detroit, and the house serves women in recovery.
A Women's Sober House in Berkley
Berkley covers a little over two and a half square miles and holds about fifteen thousand people, laid out in a grid of small single-family houses between Royal Oak and Oak Park. The street address of this residence is not published, and applications go through the operator. What the location settles is the daily logistics. Everything in Berkley is inside a short walk or a bus ride: the Twelve Mile Road and Coolidge Highway corridors carry the local retail and restaurant jobs that hire fastest, and Royal Oak's larger job market and hospital campus start a few blocks east.
How Michigan Certifies Recovery Residences
Certification is the most useful thing to understand about any Michigan sober house, because the state supplies nothing else. There is no license, no registry and no inspection requirement for recovery housing in Michigan. The Michigan Association of Recovery Residences certifies homes that apply, against the standards of the National Alliance for Recovery Residences, and it is entirely voluntary. A certified residence has agreed in writing to a code of ethics, to disclosing fees and house rules before anyone moves in, to a written relapse and discharge policy, and to a complaint process that a resident can take past the house manager. Homes that have never applied make up a large part of the state's stock, and many of them are good. The four commitments are simply the sharpest questions a woman can bring to a tour.
Recovery Housing in Berkley and Southern Oakland County
Oakland County is the wealthiest and most populous county in Michigan after Wayne, and its recovery infrastructure is correspondingly deep. Pontiac is the county seat and holds the circuit court, the county jail and Oakland County Community Health Network. Corewell Health's Royal Oak hospital campus is minutes from Berkley, and the county's drug treatment court and outpatient providers are spread across the Woodward Avenue corridor. For a woman whose family, job and court obligations are all in southern Oakland County, a Berkley address keeps every one of them within a fifteen minute drive.
What to Ask Before Moving Into This Berkley Recovery Home
Applications go to the operator directly. The questions that reveal how a women's recovery home actually runs are the concrete ones: what the weekly or monthly fee is and what it includes, whether a deposit is due at move-in and how it is refunded, whether a house manager lives on site, how many women share a bedroom, whether there is a curfew and a testing schedule, whether medication for opioid use disorder is accepted, what happens on the day after a relapse, and how long a resident may stay once she is working. A house that answers those in writing is worth touring.
This program reaches out to women with life struggling issues, such as drug and alcohol addictions;homelessness, abuse, and other crisis situations. Women are offered resources, to live a responsible and productive Christ-centered life.
