About this Sober House
Hand Up Ministries is a men's recovery residence on Southeast 59th Street in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, in Oklahoma County. The campus houses men leaving incarceration and men leaving addiction, on a program the ministry frames as a hand up and not a hand out.
A Men's Recovery Residence on Southeast 59th Street
The campus sits in the southeast quadrant of Oklahoma City, inside the city limits and inside the county that holds the courts, the probation offices and the labor market a returning citizen depends on. This is a campus and not a house, and that distinction is the most important thing on this listing. With capacity for 294 men, it is one of the largest recovery housing operations in Oklahoma, and it functions less like a shared home and more like a residential community with chapel services, work crews, mentoring groups and its own internal culture. Someone who wants a quiet six-bed house should look elsewhere. Someone who wants to disappear into a crowd of people doing the same work will find it here.
Reentry Recovery Housing for Men Leaving Incarceration
Most recovery residences in Oklahoma screen for people coming out of treatment. This one takes people coming out of custody, which is a harder population to house and a much thinner part of the market. A man released from an Oklahoma prison often has no identification, no address, no phone and no ride, and a legal calendar that starts running immediately. The ministry's first phase is built entirely around those problems: immediate housing, food and clothing, identification, transportation, a phone, community resources, and help with legal requirements and medical matters. The point of the phase is stated plainly, that a resident has an address and a place to call home from day one.
Three Phases Through This Sober Living Program
The program moves through three published stages. Phase one is stabilization. Phase two is transition and employment, where most new residents are working and moving around the community independently, and where each man is assigned to a mentoring and accountability group. Phase three is transformation, where a resident has the consistency of skills, mindset and behavior that reintegration takes, and where moving into permanent housing outside the program becomes a decision instead of a deadline. The ministry states there is no deadline for leaving, which is unusual and which matters for a man whose record makes the first year of job hunting slow.
Capacity and What a Large Recovery Housing Campus Offers
The Oklahoma Alliance for Recovery Resources lists this residence with capacity for 294 men. Scale buys things a small house cannot: chaplains on staff, a praise and worship ministry, a transportation program, graduation celebrations, a resident newsletter, and enough men at every stage of the program that a newcomer can see the whole arc in front of him. Residents write and perform their own material for Sunday chapel, and the ministry publishes resident poetry and songwriting. For a man who has spent years being counted, never known, being handed a role in front of an audience is not a small thing.
Southeast Oklahoma City and Oklahoma County Recovery Homes
Oklahoma City is the state capital and the seat of Oklahoma County, and it holds roughly twenty-five certified recovery residences along with the courts, the state agencies and the outpatient providers that a man rebuilding a life needs to reach. Interstates 35, 40 and 44 all pass through the city, and the southeast side sits close to the Interstate 35 and Interstate 40 junction, which puts the metro's warehouses, plants and service employers within a commute. Oklahoma's Department of Mental Health and Substance Abuse Services maintains statewide treatment and recovery resources. Applications go through the ministry directly, using the form on its own site.
