Oakwood Home for Women

About Oakwood Home for Women

Oakwood Home for Women is a sober living operator in Shreveport, Louisiana, providing recovery housing for women in Caddo Parish. It has taken in women recovering from alcoholism and addiction since 1974, and it operates on donations and a nominal room and board fee instead of a market weekly rate.

Fifty Years as a Shreveport Recovery Housing Provider

Founded in 1974, this is one of the longest-running recovery housing organizations in Louisiana. That tenure is the most useful fact available about it. Recovery housing is a high-turnover field, and most providers do not survive a decade, let alone five. An organization still operating after fifty years in one city has weathered funding collapses, staff turnover, and every change in how addiction has been understood and treated since the 1970s. It has also produced fifty years of alumni in northwest Louisiana, which is a network no new operator can assemble.

A Recovery Housing Provider That Does Not Turn Women Away

Residents pay a nominal fee for room and board when they are able, and no woman is turned away because she cannot pay. That single policy defines what kind of organization this is and who it can serve. A woman leaving a jail term, a detox unit or an abusive household with no money and no job has no options at a market weekly rate, and market-rate recovery housing is what almost all of Louisiana offers. An operator working on donations and a nominal fee is filling the gap at the bottom of the market, where the need is largest and the supply is close to nonexistent.

Twelve-Step Recovery as the Organizing Model

The organization works the twelve steps of Alcoholics Anonymous, supported by volunteers and by the residents themselves. There is no clinical staff and no treatment program. The model is peer-led, step-based and demanding, and it is the whole of what the organization does. Women who need clinical supervision should look to a licensed treatment provider, and Louisiana's Department of Health maintains the state directory of those. Women who want to live among others working the steps, in a house where that is the entire point, are the intended residents.

Evaluating a Louisiana Sober Living Operator

Louisiana does not license or register recovery residences, and certification through the Louisiana Association of Recovery Residences is voluntary with no public directory. In a state where nothing can be looked up, the questions worth asking an operator are about tenure, referrals and money: how long it has housed women in the region, which treatment providers and courts refer to it, how the fee is set and what happens when a resident cannot pay, and who reviews a complaint that the house cannot resolve. An organization with a fifty-year record answers the first of those simply by existing.

Serving Shreveport and Northwest Louisiana

Shreveport is the seat of Caddo Parish and the largest city in northwest Louisiana, drawing from a region that reaches the Texas and Arkansas lines. Women's recovery housing across that region is scarce, and someone completing treatment in Bossier, DeSoto, Webster, Red River or Claiborne Parish often finds that Shreveport holds the only beds within an hour. The city also holds the courts, the hospitals and the employers, so a resident placed here can meet her obligations without a second relocation.