About this Recovery Home
The Women's Home is a women's recovery residence on North George Mason Drive in Arlington, Virginia, in Arlington County and part of the Northern Virginia region. It has housed women in recovery since 1963 and is licensed by the Commonwealth of Virginia as a residential community-based provider of substance abuse services.
A Women's Recovery Residence Operating Since 1963
The organization began as a small residence near the railroad tracks in Alexandria and moved to Arlington in 1964 with the support of a local philanthropist. In 1985 it moved again, into the larger building it still occupies. Sixty years of continuous operation in one county is close to unheard of in recovery housing, and it means the house has outlasted several generations of referral sources, funding models and neighbors. A woman moving in is joining something with institutional memory instead of a business that opened last year.
A Twelve-Bed Sober House With a Resident Manager
Capacity is twelve residents plus a resident manager who lives in the building. Both halves of that figure matter. Twelve is small enough that a household functions as a household, with shared meals, shared chores and residents who know each other, and it is large enough to sustain peer accountability when one or two people are struggling. A manager living on site means the hours when nothing is scheduled, evenings, weekends, the middle of the night, are covered by someone who is present in the building.
State Licensure Behind This Recovery Home
The Home is licensed by the Commonwealth of Virginia as a residential community-based provider of substance abuse services. That is a different credential from recovery residence certification and it carries its own obligations: a licensed provider is subject to state regulation, inspection and complaint review as a condition of holding the license. The organization is also a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit. Anyone comparing residences in Virginia should ask which credentials a house holds by name, and confirm certification separately against the state register of certified recovery residences, which the Commonwealth republishes monthly.
A Single-Gender Recovery Home in Arlington County
The residence serves women only, and in a twelve-bed house that restriction is more consequential than it would be in a larger building. Every bathroom, every house meeting and every shared room belongs to one population, and the rules were written for it from the start. For a woman leaving treatment, a small single-gender household is often the difference between a placement she stays in and one she leaves in the first month.
Recovery Housing in Arlington and Northern Virginia
Arlington is a county, not a city, and it has no county seat; the county government, the courts and the detention facility all sit together in the Courthouse area. The address is on North George Mason Drive beside Virginia Hospital Center, which is the county's main hospital, and Marymount University is a short distance north. Arlington Transit and Metrobus cover the corridor, and the Ballston and East Falls Church Metro stations put downtown Washington within half an hour. Northern Virginia has the highest housing costs in the Commonwealth and correspondingly little affordable recovery housing, so a long-established nonprofit residence inside Arlington County is a scarce thing.
Applying to This Arlington Women's Sober House
Applications go through the nonprofit that operates the residence. The questions worth putting in writing are the ones a licensed provider can answer from its own policies: what the program fee is and what it covers, how long a typical stay runs, how bedrooms are assigned in a twelve-bed house, what the policy is on medication for opioid use disorder, what happens after a relapse, and how a complaint is escalated past the resident manager.
The Sober Living Home is a secure and structured environment for women in early recovery. Through the individual counselling and group sessions residents learn to identify risks to recovery. They develop and establish behaviours necessary for maintaining long term sobriety. Each resident works on her own individualized treatment plan. In addition to staffed sessions, residents are required to attend a minimum of five AA or NA meetings a week and to log daily recovery activities. A resident manager provides additional support and security. The counsellors and Board of Directors are supported by and Executive Director.
The Home monitors the activities of residents through approval for offsite passes, curfews and signing in and out of the facility. The Home requires total abstinence and emphasizes personal responsibility as the foundation of sober living. Random urine screens are conducted to help insure abstinence is maintained. Residents stay a minimum of three months and a maximum of one year.
