About this Recovery Home
Starfish Recovery & Wellness - 3707 Pemberton Avenue is a women's recovery residence in Richmond, Virginia, an independent city inside no county and part of DBHDS Region 4. It is certified at Level of Support 3, the supervised tier, and it is the operator's only Level 3 house.
A Women's Sober House on Pemberton Avenue
The residence sits on Pemberton Avenue in the 23222 ZIP, on Richmond's Northside. It serves women, and at the supervised level it is staffed and administered by the organization. The residents do not run it. Starfish keeps monitored entrances and exits at its residences, a formal grievance process, and individualized recovery plans whose progress is tracked through structured assessments.
The Five-Pronged Program Behind This Recovery Residence
Starfish Recovery & Wellness builds its programming around five domains: emotional, mental, social, physical and educational. Weekly mindfulness classes run through a partnership with the InnerWork Center. Weekly CrossFit training runs through a partnership with Shockoe Bottom Performance. The organization's recovery curriculum, called WELLBEING, is aligned with Virginia's Standards of Learning for Health, and a twelve-week employment readiness course is delivered with a national nonprofit partner.
Structure Across an Intensive and a Step-Down Sober Living Phase
Programming runs five days a week: wellness or educational activity in the morning, clinical recovery groups or one-on-one sessions in the afternoon, and mutual-aid or wellness groups in the evening. The intensive phase typically lasts twenty-eight days to six months. Residents who sustain engagement and abstinence move into a step-down phase, where they work or attend school while remaining in the residence. Residents choose their own recovery pathway, whether twelve-step, SMART Recovery, faith-based, Dharma Recovery or another recognized approach.
What Level 3 Certification Requires of a Women's Sober House
Supervised is the most structured tier VARR certifies in Virginia, and this operator states that its staff complete a minimum of eighty hours of state-approved training and take recurring REVIVE overdose-response training. Certification itself binds the residence to a published code of ethics, written disclosure of fees and rules before move-in, a documented relapse and discharge policy, and a complaint process outside the house. Virginia requires the credential of every recovery residence in the Commonwealth.
Clinical Care Alongside This Richmond Recovery Home
The organization is trauma-informed and accepts residents with co-occurring mental health conditions where substance use disorder is also present, coordinating clinical care and referring on to higher levels of care when someone needs them. Detoxification does not happen on site; a clinical partner provides same-day medically supervised detox. Health insurance is not accepted at this time, and the operator assists insured residents with coordinating their own care.
Women's Recovery Housing in Richmond and Region 4
Richmond belongs to no county, so its courts, its community services board, VCU Health, the state agencies and the GRTC bus network all sit inside one jurisdiction. Virginia's Department of Behavioral Health and Developmental Services assigns the city to Region 4, which holds more certified recovery housing than any other part of the state. Starfish is well known in central Virginia and the Middle Peninsula for court advocacy work, and it accepts bed-to-bed transfers for people leaving custody.
