Responsibility House, Inc.

About Responsibility House, Inc.

Responsibility House, Inc. is a recovery housing provider and treatment organization in Terrytown, Louisiana, serving Jefferson Parish and greater New Orleans. The nonprofit has operated since 1994 and runs outpatient treatment, residential treatment and supportive housing built on Housing First principles.

A Nonprofit Recovery Housing Provider With Three Program Lines

This organization is larger and more complicated than a peer-run sober living company, and understanding the structure matters before making a call. It runs two levels of outpatient substance use treatment for people living elsewhere. It runs a residential treatment program of roughly three months. And it runs supportive housing on the Housing First model, aimed at people whose central problem is that they have no address. Requirements, length of stay and clinical involvement differ across all three, so the first question at intake is which program a given opening belongs to.

What Housing First Commits This Provider To

Housing First is a defined approach with real consequences for who gets in. Housing comes before sobriety milestones or program compliance, on the evidence that people stabilize faster with an address than without one. Conventional recovery housing works the other way: residence is contingent on staying sober and following house rules, and a relapse can end a tenancy. For someone discharged from abstinence-contingent housing more than once, a Housing First provider is frequently the only remaining door. It is also the reason this organization can serve people that a standard sober living operator cannot.

Three Decades of Operating History in Jefferson Parish

Founded in 1994, the organization has more than thirty years of continuous operation on the West Bank. For an applicant or a family, tenure of that length substitutes for a great deal of investigation. A nonprofit that has held licensed clinical programs and public funding across three decades has been audited, inspected and reviewed repeatedly, and its board, filings and program descriptions are matters of public record. Louisiana licenses substance use treatment providers through the Department of Health, which maintains the state provider directory.

Certification, Licensure and the Difference Between Them

Louisiana licenses clinical treatment and does not license recovery residences. Certification of recovery housing through the Louisiana Association of Recovery Residences is voluntary and carries no public directory. In an organization that runs both treatment and housing, those two regimes apply to different parts of the same nonprofit. Anyone evaluating it should be specific about which arm a credential belongs to, because a license held by the clinical program says nothing about the housing and the reverse is equally true.

Serving the West Bank and Greater New Orleans

Terrytown sits directly south of Gretna, the West Bank seat of Jefferson Parish, and across the Mississippi from New Orleans. The location gives the organization the whole metropolitan area to draw from and to place people into. Jefferson Transit covers the Terry Parkway and Belle Chasse Highway corridors, the Crescent City Connection reaches downtown in minutes, and the Twenty-Fourth Judicial District Court sits in Gretna. Referrals come from across Orleans and Jefferson Parishes, and a resident can hold obligations in both from one address.

Who This Organization Is Built For

The programs suit people who need treatment and housing from the same provider, people leaving incarceration or homelessness in greater New Orleans, and people who have run out of options at abstinence-contingent houses. Anyone specifically looking for a peer-run sober house with a house manager, weekly rent and resident-enforced rules should ask whether that model exists inside the organization, because these programs are built on a different footing.