Catholic Social Services

About Catholic Social Services

Catholic Social Services is a recovery housing provider in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, operating four certified sober living homes in Escanaba, Iron Mountain and Menominee. The agency runs them under the name Catholic Social Services of the Upper Peninsula, with offices in Marquette, Escanaba and Iron Mountain.

An Upper Peninsula Recovery Housing Provider

The houses are recovery housing and not treatment. Each one is a self-run household with a certified peer recovery coach as house manager, and clinical care comes from outpatient providers in the same towns. Residents are expected to stay sober, attend counseling and weekly recovery meetings of their own choosing, look actively for work, build daily living skills and plan a move into independent housing. The agency's contribution is the roof, the structure and the continuity, in a region where the alternative for many people leaving treatment is a couch or a shelter.

Four Sober Living Homes Across Three Counties

The portfolio is small, single-gender and spread along the southern edge of the peninsula:

• Alpha Omega I, in Iron Mountain, Dickinson County, for men. Opened 2012.
• Alpha Omega II, in Escanaba, Delta County, for men. Opened 2018.
• Hosanna House, in Escanaba, Delta County, for women. Opened 2022.
• Elizabeth's House, in Menominee, Menominee County, for women. Opened 2024.

The opening dates tell the story of a program that has grown steadily for more than a decade, adding a house roughly every three years and covering both genders in Escanaba before expanding to a third county.

Men's and Women's Sober Houses Run Separately

Every residence is single-gender. Men apply to Alpha Omega I in Iron Mountain or Alpha Omega II in Escanaba, and women apply to Hosanna House in Escanaba or Elizabeth's House in Menominee. The agency runs separate contact lines for the men's and the women's houses, which means an applicant reaches someone who knows the specific households in question.

MARR Certification Across These Recovery Residences

Michigan has no state license or registry for recovery residences, and the Michigan Association of Recovery Residences certifies house by house, not operator by operator. This agency carries certification in every town where it houses people, at Level 3 on the scale defined by the National Alliance for Recovery Residences, which describes supervised housing with organized programming and administrative oversight. An operator that has sought certification for all of its housing has chosen to work inside a published code of ethics, written disclosure of fees and rules, and an external complaint process. Anyone comparing options should still confirm the certification of the specific house being applied to.

How Fees and Insurance Work With This Sober Living Operator

The fee schedule is published and is the same across the houses. For residents with state insurance, PHIP covers the first sixty days. On the sixty-first day the resident begins paying $315 a month for two months, and from the one hundred twenty-first day the rate is $630 a month. Residents with commercial insurance pay $630 a month from their first day. The escalating structure puts the lowest cost in the weeks immediately after treatment, when a resident is least likely to be earning, and the full rate arrives after four months of job searching. Residents with felony records are accepted at every house, and every house accepts medication for opioid use disorder.

One Application, Several Upper Peninsula Recovery Homes

Applying to the agency, and not to a single house, has a practical payoff in a region this thin on beds. A man turned away from a full house in Escanaba can be considered in Iron Mountain, and a woman can be considered in Escanaba or Menominee, without starting a new search or repeating an intake. Questions worth asking at the operator level: how referrals from treatment providers, drug courts and probation are handled, how a transfer between towns works, how deposits are documented, and how a complaint moves past a house manager to the agency.