70x7 Life Recovery

About 70x7 Life Recovery

70x7 Life Recovery is a sober living operator in Grand Rapids, Michigan, running certified recovery housing in Kent and Ottawa counties. The organization works with men and women returning to the community after incarceration, and both of its residences are certified by the Michigan Association of Recovery Residences.

A West Michigan Recovery Housing Provider for Returning Citizens

The population 70x7 Life Recovery serves defines the organization. People leaving prison and jail face a housing market that screens them out, an employment market that screens them out, and a recovery task that gets harder with every rejection. The response here is to hold housing, employment help, classes, mentorship and family support inside one organization, so a resident is not assembling those pieces from four agencies with four waiting lists. The nonprofit keeps offices at Clyde Park Avenue SW in Wyoming, on the south side of the Grand Rapids metro, and at West 22nd Street in Holland.

Two Certified Sober Homes Across Kent and Ottawa Counties

The organization operates two certified recovery residences:

• The Benson house, in Grand Rapids, Kent County, for men.
• Bernice's House, in Grand Haven, Ottawa County, for women.

Neither residence has a published street address, and placement in both runs through the operator. The two counties are adjacent, which means a resident referred from one side of the metro can be housed on the other without leaving the region's provider network.

Men's and Women's Sober Houses Kept Separate

Each residence is single-gender. Men apply to the Grand Rapids house and women to the Grand Haven house, and keeping the split at the building level means house rules, shared space and meetings are written for one population. It also means the operator can run different programming in each: the men's house is oriented toward employment and stable citizenship after incarceration, while the women's house leans on peer recovery coaching and Community Mental Health connections.

Certification Across This Operator's Recovery Homes

Both residences hold Level 3 certification, the supervised tier defined by the National Alliance for Recovery Residences. Michigan does not license, certify or register recovery residences through any state agency, so an operator that carries certification on every house it runs has volunteered for the only external standard available: a published code of ethics, written disclosure of fees and rules before move-in, a documented relapse and discharge policy, and complaint review from outside the house. Certification is granted residence by residence, so an applicant should confirm the specific address.

Fees and Funding at This Sober Living Operator

The program fee at both residences is $600 per month, and residents on medication for opioid use disorder are accepted at both. Applicants with felony records are accepted, which for this operator is the point and not an exception.

Serving Grand Rapids and the Lakeshore

Grand Rapids supplies the courts, the parole offices, the outpatient treatment and the entry-level employment for most of West Michigan, and Grand Haven anchors the Ottawa County lakeshore as the county seat. Running a house in each means the operator can place someone near family, near a job, or away from the neighborhood where the use happened, which is often the decisive variable. Anyone comparing recovery housing providers in this part of the state is working from a short list, and one that pairs certified beds with reentry services is shorter still.