Turning Point Center of Bennington County

About Turning Point Center of Bennington County

Turning Point Center of Bennington County is a recovery housing provider and peer recovery center in Bennington, Vermont, operating certified recovery housing in Bennington County. The organization runs peer recovery coaching, family coaching, wellness programming and intensive substance use groups for men and women on probation or parole, alongside the men's recovery residence it manages in the town.

A Bennington County Recovery Housing Provider

This organization put the first sober living house in the county on the map. Before it opened, the nearest men's recovery residence was in Rutland, and staff have said publicly that when the project started, Vermont law had not yet settled on a definition of sober living. The center pushed the project through anyway, working with a local housing developer through a grant process, an architect, a property owner who held the site through a two-year delay, and the state's certifying body. That history is the best available evidence of what the organization does when a project stalls.

Recovery Coaching Alongside the Housing

Every member of the residence is assigned a recovery coach, and coaching is delivered by staff who are themselves in recovery or have been affected by a loved one's substance use disorder. Coaches from the center support the house manager, so the person overseeing the household is not carrying it alone. The center also runs family coaching for relatives trying to understand boundaries and their own limits, which addresses the people a resident is most likely to be returning to.

Working With Probation and Parole

The center runs intensive substance use disorder groups for men and women under community supervision. For a resident whose recovery and legal obligations are tangled together, having the group and the housing under one organization removes a coordination problem that otherwise falls on him.

Serving Southwestern Vermont

Bennington is a shire town of Bennington County and the service center for the southwestern corner of the state, with Southwestern Vermont Medical Center, the courthouse and the Route 7 corridor north to Rutland. The organization has said it maintains a waiting list for its housing and hopes to open another house in the town, which is the clearest signal available about demand in this part of Vermont.