Second Wind Foundation

About Second Wind Foundation

Second Wind Foundation is a recovery housing provider and recovery center operator based in White River Junction, Vermont, running two certified recovery residences in Windsor County. The organization grew out of the Turning Point Club, founded in 1992 as a meeting place for Alcoholics Anonymous members and broadened in 1998 to serve every recovery pathway. It took that model to the State House in 2001, and Vermont's statewide recovery center network traces back to that push.

The Origin of Vermont's Recovery Center Network

This organization is the reason a person in almost any Vermont town can now walk into a peer-run drop-in center. The foundation's own center, Upper Valley Turning Point, sits off Route 5 near the Wilder and Norwich line and is open seven days a week at no cost to anyone who comes through the door. More than twenty support meetings run there weekly, including groups the staff facilitate for parents of people using substances, for any addiction and any recovery path, and for practising techniques aimed at rebuilding neural pathways damaged by substance use.

Two Recovery Homes in the Upper Valley

The foundation operates:

• Willow Grove, in White River Junction, a residence for women that allows their children to live with them.
• Jack's House, in White River Junction, opened in 2021, for men with children.

Both are family-style and substance-free. Residents work or volunteer and pay a modest fee for the services attached to the housing. The average stay runs six to twelve months while a resident is actively working the goals in their recovery plan.

Recovery Housing That Keeps Parents With Their Children

Both residences are built so a parent does not have to choose between recovery housing and custody. That is rare in Vermont and rarer still for fathers, and it removes the reason many parents refuse a bed after treatment. Housing a parent and child together also changes what the household is for: a resident is practising the daily routine they will need in their own apartment, with their own kid, from the first week.

How This Recovery Housing Provider Handles Relapse

The foundation has said publicly that its two homes are not equipped to deliver clinical services when a resident relapses, and that its practice is to hold a bed for a set period while the person gets help and recommits, using treatment and stabilization beds elsewhere in the meantime. Stating that policy plainly is more useful to an applicant than any promise, because it tells them exactly what happens on the worst day.

Careers, Not Just Jobs, After a Sober House

Staff work with residents on career goals instead of pushing them toward the fastest available paycheck, on the reasoning that a job with a decent wage and benefits holds up better over years than a stopgap in a setting where substances are close at hand. Residents have also used state-funded scholarships to cover initial fees on arrival, which lets someone settle into the recovery community without starting out behind.