Overview:
Savio House’s Bluestem program helps parents recover from addiction while living with their children during treatment.
For decades, traditional rehabilitation programs have required parents to separate from their children during treatment. Denver nonprofit Savio House is reimagining addiction recovery through its new Bluestem program that allows parents battling substance use disorder to receive recovery services while continuing to live with their families.
“There really aren’t great options to address substance misuse disorder, parental substance misuse disorder and keep kids safely with their parents,” said Savio House Associate Executive Director Julia Roguski. “We’re really trying to align with reality and how families function and provide them with a safe place to keep their children with them and address their needs for recovery.”
Founded in 1966 as a residential orphanage for boys, Savio House has evolved into a family-focused child welfare organization that now serves more than 1,700 Colorado families each year. Today, approximately 90% of Savio’s therapeutic services are delivered in families’ homes or communities, an evidence-based approach that aims to support children within stable family environments rather than removing them.
“We used to be a residential facility for adolescent boys and we closed that in the beginning of 2020 because we found a lot more sustainable results,” said Savio House’s Bluestem Communications and Development Associate Emma Oremus, “and a lot of research that supported that these kiddos thrive when they were in the home with their parents.”
Set to open this spring, the Bluestem program will offer wraparound recovery services for entire families at no cost to participants. The property includes six townhomes for families in recovery and one additional townhome for 24/7 on-site staff to ensure child safety and provide support.
“We human beings heal in relationships and live in relationships,” Roguski said. “Substance misuse disorder is very much a generational issue. When children go into foster care, it is devastating. It has long-term impacts on kids. Being away from their parents, having that disruption of attachment and connection, is devastating to kids and every day a child is in foster care, they are less likely to have a successful reunification and more likely to end up in foster care. We’re really attempting to keep families together to eliminate the damage that’s done by out-of-home placement and keep kids and families safe while supporting parents in their healing journey.”
Parental substance misuse is the leading reason children under 12 are removed from their homes nationwide. Instead of placing children into foster care, Bluestem will house parents, partners and children together while coordinating addiction treatment off-site. Inside the townhomes, services will focus on rebuilding family relationships through trauma therapy, parenting skills coaching and family counseling.
“We will take a teaming approach to ensure that we are working together, swimming all together in the same direction and making sure that treatment plans are aligned,” Roguski said. “We will always be approaching things with collaboration and, of course, supporting families having a voice in that process.”
Each family will receive a personalized recovery plan, and Savio House will partner with community organizations to connect participants with food assistance, employment support, education resources and child welfare case management.
“I’m excited about really giving kids that everyday experience that we think every kid should have that we take for granted sometimes,” Oremus said. “Being able to wake up in your own bed and see your mom and dad and to know where you’re going to school and coming home—just those things that maybe many of us take for granted as being such gifts.”
All addiction and rehabilitation treatments will be conducted off-site, while services inside the townhomes will strictly focus on rebuilding family relationships. Bluestem’s first step is getting the parent sober; then they will begin the parent-coaching and reintegration services.
“Addiction recovery is about learning how to live. It’s not just learning not to use and put down the substance. It’s about developing life skills and learning how to live and have a healthy rhythm in your life,” said psychotherapist and addiction specialist Dr. Anita Gadhia-Smith. “The real work begins once you leave treatment and you learn how to be in your life, go to work, deal with your children’s schedules and all the different things that happen in the course of life.”
Gadhia-Smith also emphasized the importance of treating the whole family during the recovery process in order to encourage stability for the children involved.
“Early recovery is the time of great instability and it’s very often not stable for a while. It usually takes the person in recovery the first couple of years to really stabilize and for the home environment to settle,” Gadhia-Smith said. “Kids pick up on what isn’t said. They pick up on the emotional thermostat; even if no one’s talking about the tensions, they still feel it.”
Gadhia-Smith also believes that treating the family as a unit for a parent’s substance misuse rather than localizing treatment on the parent will significantly help children understand the gravity of addiction as a genetic disease.
“Including everyone will help everyone to understand that they all have an issue. Even though intellectually a lot of people know that it’s a family, they don’t really think they have it,” Gadhia-Smith said. “There’s more denial on the part of the family members than the addicted person and this will help break through that denial much more effectively.”
The Bluestem property is currently under construction, with a projected grand opening in the spring and families expected to move in this summer. Participants are anticipated to live in the townhomes for about a year while Savio House helps them secure permanent housing and provides aftercare services.
“If a child goes into foster care even one time, it increases their likelihood of going into foster care again and repeating that cycle with their own children,” Roguski said. “The larger goal here is to stop the intergenerational cycle and create a more healthy family.”
