Great Lakes Recovery Centers

About Great Lakes Recovery Centers

Great Lakes Recovery Centers is a sober living operator with certified recovery residences in Marquette, Michigan, and four other Upper Peninsula towns. Marquette County holds two of its six houses; the others sit in Delta, Chippewa and Baraga counties. Housing is one line of a behavioral health organization that also runs outpatient and residential treatment, prevention work and youth services, and the residences are the part of that system that gives someone a stable address while the rest of it does its work.

Recovery Housing Built for the Distances of the Upper Peninsula

Distance defines this operator's job. The Upper Peninsula holds about three percent of Michigan's population spread across nearly a third of its land area, and a resident in Baraga County cannot commute to a program in Chippewa County. The answer has been to place houses in the towns that hold the courts, the hospitals and the jobs, then staff each one and supply case management locally. The fee, the expectations and the certification standard stay identical from one address to the next, which is the part a resident notices when moving between them.

Six Sober Living Homes From Chippewa County to Baraga County

Six recovery residences carry the Great Lakes Recovery Centers name, and each is certified individually:

• Delta Recovery Residence, in Escanaba, for men.
• Gary's House, in Sault Ste. Marie, for men.
• Anne's House, in Sault Ste. Marie, for women and children.
• John Kivela Recovery Residence, in Marquette, for men.
• Ripple Recovery Residence, in L'Anse, for women and children.
• Sue B's House, on South Fourth Street in Ishpeming, for women and children.

Sue B's House is the only one of the six with a published street. For the other five, placement runs through the organization, and the two houses in Sault Ste. Marie are separate households at separate addresses, one for men and one for women. Ishpeming and Marquette sit fifteen miles apart on US 41, so the operator holds two of its houses inside one labor market and one hospital catchment.

Women's Recovery Homes That Accept Children

Every residence is single-gender. Three serve men and three serve women, and all three women's houses are certified to take women with children, which is the scarcest thing this operator provides. Keeping the split at the house level means the rules, the meetings and the shared space are written for one population, and no resident is the only woman or the only man in the building. It also means a mother in Baraga, Chippewa or Marquette County has somewhere to apply that does not require handing her children to someone else first.

Level 3 Certification Across Every Recovery Residence

All six houses are certified at Level 3 by the Michigan Association of Recovery Residences, the state's affiliate of the National Alliance for Recovery Residences. Michigan issues no license for recovery housing, so certification is voluntary and an operator that carries it on every house has chosen to be measured. Level 3 describes supervised housing: paid staff, written policies, administrative oversight above the household and structured programming. Certification adds a code of ethics, advance written disclosure of fees and rules, and a complaint process that reaches past the house manager.

One Admission Standard for Every Sober House

The published standard is the same at all six addresses: eighteen or older, able to live in a shared household, at least thirty days of recovery on arrival, weekly attendance at a self-help meeting, participation in the weekly house meeting, active involvement in outpatient services, and full-time employment within sixty days. Program fees run $425 per month at the houses that publish a figure. Staff provide individualized case management inside the homes, and clinical care comes through outpatient services, some of it delivered by the organization itself.

Who Fills These Upper Peninsula Recovery Homes

The houses suit someone leaving detox, residential treatment or custody who has thirty days behind them and needs the next year to be predictable. Medication for opioid use disorder is accepted and the residences are recorded as felony friendly, which together cover the two populations most often turned away from recovery housing. Anyone who needs clinical supervision on site is a poor match; that care comes from outpatient providers while the house supplies the address, the structure and the peers.