About this Recovery Home
Ben's House is a certified men's sober living home in Derby, Vermont, in Orleans County, run by the Kingdom Wellness Collaborative. It sits on eleven acres of open fields and gardens with extensive frontage on Derby Pond, and it serves men with substance use disorder arriving from inpatient treatment or incarceration.
A Men's Sober House on Eleven Acres
The setting is the point here in a way it rarely is. Eleven acres of fields, gardens and pond frontage gives residents somewhere to be outdoors and something to do with their hands, which matters when the alternative in a rural county is a house with nowhere to walk to. The operator describes the environment as therapeutic and tailored to men coming out of treatment or a correctional facility. The exact address is not published, and applications run through the operator.
Sober Living With Workforce Development Attached
This is a recovery residence and a workforce development program in one. The stated aim is that a resident develops the life skills, coping skills, peer support and clinical connections needed to rebuild, and that he becomes self-supporting with a path toward permanent housing. Attaching work to the housing addresses the thing that most often ends a placement in the Northeast Kingdom, which is that a man leaves treatment into a county with few entry-level jobs and no way to reach the ones that exist.
What Vermont Certification Establishes for This Recovery Residence
The house is accredited by the Vermont Alliance for Recovery Residences, which the operator describes as demonstrating adherence to a rigorous set of national standards. Certification obliges a residence to a published code of ethics, written disclosure of fees and rules before move-in, a documented relapse and discharge policy, an annual onsite inspection and grievances reviewed from outside. Vermont has no licensure scheme for recovery housing, so this is the whole of the formal record.
Required Peer Support and Multiple Pathways
Every resident must have a recovery coach through the regional recovery community center in Newport and is expected to engage there for peer support and groups covering all-recovery, NA, parents in recovery and emotional sobriety. On-site groups include AA, NA, all-recovery and meditation. The operator states plainly that it believes in multiple pathways of recovery, which is a meaningful position for a house that also runs twelve-step meetings.
Recovery Housing in Orleans County and the Northeast Kingdom
Derby sits in Orleans County near the Canadian border, with Newport, the shire town, immediately west. North Country Hospital, the county courthouse and the recovery community center are all in Newport, and Interstate 91 runs north to the border and south toward St. Johnsbury. This is one of very few certified recovery residences in the Northeast Kingdom, which makes it the practical option for men in a large and thinly served region.
