01/15/2026
Changes are coming quickly in the world of mental health and substance use recovery support.
After losing our contract last year, we’ve been fighting to regain our footing. At this point, without additional funding, we are projected to shut down by October. Yesterday, two of our community partners, Coulee Recovery Center and Next Steps For Change, were briefly impacted, directly or indirectly, by another round of SAMHSA terminations. While those decisions were ultimately reversed and their operations did not change, we know all too well how fast that ground can shift.
Each of our organizations provides critical support in different ways. We are part of a spectrum. Recovery is not one-size-fits-all, no matter how hard systems try to force it into that box.
Funding priorities are shifting rapidly, and many of us are learning a harsh lesson about what we once believed were guarantees. We understand why this is happening, and we understand now that we cannot build our future on federal, state, or county funding. Organizations across the country that rely on these funds are being forced to confront brutal realities.
This leaves our community with a question: what do we want to be available for people who are trying to rebuild their lives?
Of course, each of us hopes you will choose our organization, we know the impact of our work. But the truth is larger than any one program. The new rules around diagnosis and outcomes reporting will be just as flawed as they’ve always been. We are told to prove impact using tools that don’t reflect real recovery. We are told our work doesn’t count because it can’t be reduced to a number.
Those of us who lived it know better.
We know we are not data points. We know the assessments and outcomes don’t capture what actually happened in our lives. Those of us that lived through it have spent years fighting to be heard, only to once again have our lived expertise overshadowed by “professionals” who learned about us from a book.
We hope to continue this work, not blindly, but deliberately. We hope because we know how important it is. And we hope because we’ve already lost too many, and we don’t want to watch it continue.
