Challenging, relational programs are an effective path to life transformation. The only downside to such models is that they usually require a high ratio of staff and volunteers to clients. It seems reasonable that implementing such a model in a residential addiction recovery program would demand round-the-clock vigilance and 24/7 staffing to help keep former addicts from falling back into bad habits. Surprisingly, Ascent Recovery proves that there is another way. In their program, clients hold each other accountable, with minimal input from program staff and no authority figures living on site. 

In 2008, Teddy Steen, a credentialed substance abuse counselor, set out to build a residential transformation program for men in Joplin, Missouri. In preparation, she spent nearly two years visiting and researching other programs around the country, finally finding an Atlanta-based nonprofit with a model she felt was worth emulating.

Today, ASCENT Recovery Residences is a year-long residential transformation program for men recovering from drug and alcohol addiction—it is not a treatment program, but augments clinical treatment. Ascent Recovery’s model is distinguishable by two central components:

• First, it has a very challenging set of restrictions and rules for residents that relax as clients move through the program.
• Second, it uses the residents themselves as the primary enforcement mechanism for the standards of conduct rather than relying solely on the authority of the staff to enforce the rules.

This innovative model, known as a “therapeutic community,” is central to their high rate of program success. Outside of their organization, the scientific literature on this model is also very promising.

Entry into Ascent’s program is not easy—they only admit around 20% of applicants. The application process screens for clients who have a real willingness to change by ensuring they understand how difficult the program will be. Once admitted, the majority (60-70%) of residents who make it past the first few days will complete the program. From graduation, they have about an 80% success rate of maintaining sobriety. These figures stack up well against an industry average graduation rate of 30%.  This success rate is especially impressive given that Ascent takes many clients right out of jail or who have multiple offenses on their record. The program’s performance is above average because it is more challenging and relational than normal. Its rigorous standards ensure that only clients serious about change enter the program and the relational power of the community they create serves as a catalyst for real change. 

The Standards

Ascent divides its program into two phases. The first phase has a 7-man capacity, and the second phase has a 5-man capacity; the men of each phase are housed separately. Each participant is on an individualized track, so the community evolves as men enter, phase up, and graduate at their own pace. Graduation from each phase is based on a set of explicit requirements rather than a strict timeline. Clients pay $100 a week for the program, as well as pooling $40 a week to collectively buy the groceries they need.

In the first phase (the Intensive Residential Program), residents give up all electronics, control of their money, and unapproved access to people and places outside of the program. There are also required chores, classes, church attendance, Alcoholics Anonymous/Narcotics Anonymous meetings, drug testing, and counseling. After the first few weeks, clients work offsite in addition to their programmatic duties.

Once clients graduate to the second phase, the Extended Residential Program, they move to a new shared home, regain access to electronics, manage their own finances, and have less restricted contact with people outside of the program.

Community-Based Development

With so many rules and restrictions, it seems like Ascent would necessarily require someone to keep track of each client and hold him accountable. In fact, Carl Perkins, the program manager, only drops into the residences a few times a week, to lead classes or participate in select house meetings. Program participants are expected to both enforce the rules with one another and solve their own internal conflicts. Clients only call staff to report violence, missing persons, drug/alcohol use, or medical emergencies. How is this possible?

Residents begin the program by creating a contract with the Ascent staff and the other community members. In addition to agreeing to the clearly defined structures of the program, they also identify “concrete goals” (e.g. getting a job, saving money, staying sober) and “growth goals” (e.g. learning how to handle anger, resolving problems with a family member, becoming more assertive). This contract is a critical part of the system of enforcement. A key section states, “The therapeutic community is responsible for confronting an individual about whom they may be concerned. Failure on the part of the community to accept their responsibility results in members engaging in a conspiracy of silence. When this occurs, you may be discharged…”

The obvious question is, “How often do residents conspire to hide rule violations?” According to Teddy Steen, such cover ups are usually very short-lived. Problems eventually bubble over and come to the attention of staff if not addressed by the community.

There are also formal systems in place for the men to use to raise their concerns. Each Sunday evening, the men prepare a shared meal, someone shares about his life story, and then men present their concerns and issues for initial discussion (e.g. “I don’t think we’ve divided up the lawn work evenly” or “Jim, I’m concerned that you aren’t following your growth goal of getting your anger under control” or “Joe, it seems like you keep drinking all of the milk”). The following evening, the men hold another meeting to address the issues that arose. The Ascent staff attends this meeting but, ideally, they don’t intervene to solve the issues—they just watch the men solve them on their own. If Carl is aware of an issue that the men didn’t bring up, such as the fact that the common areas are dirty, he will raise the issue and ask why they didn’t bring it up themselves.

If a client tries to inform the Ascent staff about a problem he has with another resident, the staff will refuse to discuss it without the other party present. Even then, staff require the men to address each other directly, not appeal to staff for arbitration. Because arbitration is not the default manner by which to settle conflict, residents must practice settling their conflict directly, as they will have to do in the world outside the program.

Best Practices

During their experience running a therapeutic community, the Ascent team has learned many things along the way.

First, it is better to be selective with the individuals they allow into the program. Early in his tenure, Carl says that he occasionally admitted a new program member against his better judgment if the applicant was insistent that he was prepared for the rigorous program. That has nearly always backfired, with the client dropping out of the program in short order. Now, if an applicant claims to know he is ready, even though the staff thinks he’s probably not, they give the client some next step or test to prove his readiness. If he completes it, they will welcome him in.

Second, as counterintuitive as this is to a program that seeks holistic recovery, they learned to limit clients’ access to family in the early part of the program. Clients occasionally protest that their children are the most important part of their lives, and that they need to spend as much time with them as possible. While this sounds sensible, Carl points out that such statements are more aspirational than true—if their kids were central to their lives, they would have sought help earlier and have remained committed to sobriety and responsibility sooner. In many cases, clients who make these claims haven’t made an effort to see their kids in over a year prior to entering the program. While Ascent believes strongly in reuniting families, they intentionally limit contact as clients are gaining stability. They find that the emotional stress of family interaction often drives men back to their addiction until they can build up other coping mechanisms. Additionally, the Ascent staff wants to protect the children from yet another disappointment or trauma. Over time, they increase exposure to family, first with letters, then planned short visits or calls, which they process in conversations with the Ascent staff.

Finally, Carl cautions that it is important to maintain the program rules without exception. Occasionally, residents will ask staff for some exception to policy, but such exceptions tend to undermine the program. With frequent exceptions to rules, residents can lose the confidence that comes from consistent standards. If someone gets authorization to violate curfew, unauthorized curfew violators are less likely to be confronted by their peers, because it is easy to rationalize that they might have received an exemption and avoid the confrontation. Additionally, it places the pressure of precedent on staff to authorize many more exemptions for many more people than they had intended from the outset. Keeping the standards as inviolable gives staff and residents the confidence of consistent rules. Enforcement is simple when the standards are constant.

Conclusion

Ascent Recovery Residences’ therapeutic community model provides a fascinating application of challenge and is doubtless applicable outside of chemical addiction recovery, as well. Regardless of whether your program adopts it completely, there are always ways to incorporate aspects of the principles and practices into your own work. For instance, the two-meeting client-led process for uncovering issues and concerns could be used in any residential program. Additionally, any program could refuse to mediate certain types of issues between clients and insist that clients address each other directly, if needed, in the presence of a staff member.

Ascent proves that people’s capacity to challenge and sharpen one another and grow to a higher level of life is often much greater than we presume.

It’s true that there’s no silver bullet for ending poverty. But one step on nearly every journey up from poverty is a good job. The data speaks for itself: a mere 2% of adults who work full-time live in poverty, according to 2019 U.S. Census Bureau data. Additionally, working adults are happier and healthier than their non-working counterparts. Klamath Works, a nonprofit located in Klamath Falls, Oregon, has taken to heart the value of work—and discovered a little-known scientific tool for getting clients into jobs that work for them.

Prior to the advent of Klamath Works in 2016, a core group of concerned citizens called over 50 local organizations to get their perspective on issues they were seeing in Klamath Falls and determine what intervention was needed. The overwhelming response was that people needed jobs, and indeed, Klamath Works has had their work cut out for them from the start—23% of the Klamath Falls population lives in poverty, a striking contrast to the 14% poverty rate across the rest of the state of Oregon. In response, Klamath Works embraced the opportunity to help men and women find independence through work. But that doesn’t mean it hasn’t come with a learning curve.

“When we first began Klamath Works, it was all about figuring out how to get people in jobs,” Joy McInnis, Klamath Works Program Director, shares. “As we’ve grown and learned, we’ve found that the ‘getting a job’ aspect was the easy part!” While overcoming basic barriers to employment such as lack of training or a criminal record are undoubtedly important, Klamath Works staff and volunteers discovered there’s so much more that must be addressed to achieve true success in the workplace and beyond. As the phrase goes, “The devil is in the details,” and indeed, it can be those details that can derail a plan that looks great on paper.

How can you anticipate those troublesome details and address them before they cripple a good effort to find employment? For Klamath Works, it all comes down to personal relationships and tailored approaches. “It usually takes more than just a few minutes to figure out why the client is in the position he’s in,” Joy offers. “That’s why it’s so important to have someone to build that rapport with clients, and that’s the role that our job coaches fill. They spend a lot of time communicating with the client.”

It’s through that steady conversation that peripheral obstacles are identified and addressed. If it’s a lack of transportation that would cause the client to be unreliable in his new job, Klamath Works refers him to their bicycle program. If it’s a lack of knowledge on how to manage finances, then the client is recommended the budgeting life skills class. 

But what about the less tangibles, like mental health issues or dysfunctional personality traits? It’s in those cases that Klamath Works has found their Structure of Intellect assessment to be key. The Structure of Intellect (SOI) assessment helps the client to, as the ancient Greek aphorism goes, “know thyself.’ The assessment evaluates three key components of intellect: Operations, Contents, and Products.

• Operations: This part of brain function includes the ability to comprehend new information as well as remember and create. 
• Contents: This refers to the building blocks of information the brain processes, such as pictures and words.  Different minds process different contents better than others, such as sounds for an auditory learner or symbols for a visual learner. 
• Products: These are the results of the brain processing information. This includes finding patterns and foreseeing consequences.

The SOI is a research-driven approach to help clients understand the unique way their mind works. While there are many competing models for understanding human intellect, any of them can help someone be introspective about their own skills and attributes. “It’s helpful to know what you think like. Knowing yourself better gives you opportunities to understand what you can work on,” Lavar Moore, SOI specialist at Klamath Works, shares. Lavar tells about one client whose assessment revealed that, due to a traumatic brain injury and a subsequent struggle with addiction, he was lacking in judgment and clarity. This honest evaluation opened the door for him and the caring staff at Klamath Works to develop a game plan so that he could practice better discernment and make healthier choices in difficult situations. More than a simple handout of material assistance or a job application coldly passed across a counter, this strategic intervention empowered him with tools to flourish.

The SOI is more than a simple personality test. It’s an in-depth, thorough evaluation of how the client processes information, and as such, it requires a significant amount of training in advance. Any organization that uses the assessment must participate in a week-long in-person training and be approved by SOI Systems for basic certification. The written assessment that the client takes—typically  over three hours to complete—is administered by a certified trainer and then fed through software that compiles the information to create a client profile. From there, a trainer with advanced education in SOI implementation is required to analyze the data and make recommendations for the client accordingly. All in all, there was about a $5,000 start-up cost for Klamath Works to integrate the SOI into their programs.

There’s certainly an implementation cost that accompanies the SOI. However, this data-driven approach coupled with heartfelt relationships can drive real solutions to difficult problems. Eric, another success story from Klamath Works, demonstrates this well. Homeless with mental health issues and a criminal record, his job prospects were dismal. “Eric came in with nothing, but he was ready to work and receive information,” Lavar shares. Though he was down on his luck, he enthusiastically gleaned from every resource offered, from the life skills classes, to the one-on-one job coaching, to building relationships with Klamath Works staff—and it’s paid off. As Lavar says, “Eric is back to work and loved by his employers, he’s stable and paying bills, he’s paying off debt.” Recently, Eric approached his mentors-turned-friends at Klamath Works to seek advice on whether he should ask for a raise at his job that he was steadily improving at and thoroughly enjoying. Through the sound advice and reassurance given by his trusted job coach, Eric was able to ask for a raise—and he got it!

What advice would Joy and Lavar share with other organizations trying to help the poor find jobs in their communities? “Remember that it’s on an individual basis,” Lavar emphasizes. “Poverty looks different for everyone—sometimes it’s a lack of skills, sometimes it’s a lack of childcare, sometimes it’s addiction, and so on. There is no blanket solution [to get people in jobs] for root causes so varied.”

That’s why Klamath Works emphasizes the importance of tailored approaches based on each client’s individual context. “It just comes down to a one-on-one relationship so that you have a better idea of what’s going on. Every situation is different,” Joy reminds. A willingness to dig deep into the specifics of a person’s situation, coupled with a compassionate and understanding heart, is what makes the difference between cold, sterile charity and life-changing help. And, as Klamath Works has found, coupling scientific approaches with that warm relationship can be a winning approach.

Have a question about how Klamath Works has integrated the Structure of Intellect assessment into their programs? Contact them through the True Charity Network Member’s Directory.  For more information about the True Charity Network, visit truecharity.us/join.

Love, In the Name of Christ (INC) of Hillsdale County doesn’t give out a single penny, meal, or piece of furniture, but the group meets needs every day. Nestled in a small town in Michigan, this Love, INC chapter is one of 122 across the United States. Love, INC acts as a clearinghouse for their local network of churches, connecting needs to appropriate ministries. They take the time to get to know the individuals asking for assistance, and often are able to meet deeper needs than those originally presented.

Jessica Fawley, executive director of Love, INC of Hillsdale County, shared how her volunteer team practically gets to know the people who call in, and where they go from there.

Set expectations

Hillsdale Love, INC volunteers always begin their conversations with a disclaimer: They don’t have any resources on hand, but can connect clients with a church who does. As a part of the intake process, they’ll go through a lengthy list of questions. Volunteers assure clients that these questions are not meant to be judgmental, but only to give Love, INC a better understanding of their particular situation. This authenticity gives the conversation a sense of rapport and respect from the very beginning.

Listen to their story

After setting expectations, the volunteer sets aside the need the individual originally called for, and focuses on getting to know him or her as a person. Often the people who call are more than willing to decompress and tell their story. Jessica pointed out that this simple act of receptivity affirms that the client is worthy of being listened to. As they listen to clients’ stories, volunteers ask questions that help them understand what brought the individual to this point of need.

Verify existing connections

Next, the volunteer verifies the need with the client’s pastor, if he or she has one. The goal here is not only to alert the pastor of a need in his congregation, but also to find out if the individual’s own community has resources he or she hasn’t tapped into yet. You can learn more about how and why we work towards reestablishing community ties through the free True Charity University Affiliation course.

Make a timeline

Volunteers help clients come up with a plan that addresses not only the initial need, but also the situations that led to it. For instance, the client might make a plan to work through his budget with a volunteer, sign up for job skills class, or meet with his mentor.

When Jessica comes alongside a client, she asks herself “Who in the body of Christ can I connect this person with?” This focus on relationship rather than material goods radically changes the conversation. Recently, Jessica worked with a woman who called in asking for a bed, but later revealed she was in an abusive marriage and felt uncomfortable in her church. Jessica was able to connect her and her husband with help, as well as put her in contact with friends from a different church.

Maintain mutual participation

Love, INC highly values mutual participation, and believes that the volunteer should never work harder than the client. Jessica explained that their model always puts the ball in the client’s court, so the process will naturally end if the client remains unwilling to participate. The key to mutual investment is the volunteer’s commitment to clear expectations, willingness to have a loving confrontation, and understanding that not everyone is ready to progress toward self-sufficiency.

Follow up

Love INC volunteers make sure to check in with their clients every month after the initial intake. Whether they become aware of new hurdles to overcome, find out the client has not followed his steps toward self-sufficiency, or hear a story of transformation, follow-up is always fruitful and essential.

Keep the goal in mind

When you’re cranking through intakes, Jessica said, it’s easy for the conversations to become very clinical. She used the decreased caseload during the pandemic as an opportunity to recalibrate her intentions, and pour more deeply into the few individuals they were able to work alongside. It’s a constant fight to focus on the person, not the need, but Jessica and her team remind themselves every day of this greater goal.

Whether your group provides food or diapers, car repair or budgeting services, we can all focus on making our intake process more relational. Love, INC’s model of setting expectations, listening, reestablishing existing relationships, and long-term mutual participation is a good place to start.