Open United Recovery Place is moving into the house with the red roof across the street from the Kent-Ravenna Walmart, offering resources and community to people in recovery.
The Open United Recovery Community (O.U.R. Place) is a state and nationally certified recovery community organization, known as an RCO. An RCO is essentially a community-run space led by people in recovery and impacted by addiction. Per RCO rules, more than 50% of an organization’s board has to be composed of people in the recovery community.
Jessika Easterling, executive director of O.U.R. Place, said they’re a peer-led space that aims to create and provide as many opportunities for recovery as possible.
“We have a lot of different programming and a lot of different routes to make recovery accessible,” she said.
O.U.R Place started programming in 2019 and through a partnership with The Haven of Portage County, obtained the space at 2659 Kent-Ravenna Road this year.
“They had this house on their lot that they didn’t have specific plans for,” Easterling said. “Initially, we talked about potentially doing recovery housing here, but we ended up deciding to use [the space].”
When the pandemic started, it changed O.U.R. Place’s plans, as stay-at-home orders and limits for in-person gatherings made it difficult to physically connect with the community they serve. Easterling said they immediately got a Zoom account and hosted meetings virtually, but a lot of members of the recovery community said not having an in-person space was an issue.
Once the stay-at-home orders began to expire, Easterling met with county and health commissioners, as well as the county coroner, to develop a plan to reduce the potential swell of overdose deaths as relapse numbers skyrocketed during the pandemic.
As a result, they began holding two consecutive meetings at the churches they partnered with — Lake Brady United Methodist Church and Kent United Methodist Church — to avoid having too many people in one space at one time.
“We didn’t plan to have a full schedule of recovery support meetings until we had a central space,” Easterling said. “But because Covid hit, we were like, ‘Let’s partner with these churches and respond to the community,’ because that’s what we do as a community organization.”
Meanwhile, O.U.R. Place started working on the renovations the Kent-Ravenna Road location needed to get the building into shape so they could offer their programming there.
Since renovating and getting the space together, Easterling said O.U.R. Place has been able to offer more unique programs that weren’t already available in the community like SMART Recovery, Refuge Recovery and Crystal Meth Anonymous, in addition to more traditional recovery support meetings like AA and NA.
O.U.R. Place is open from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. and people can drop in whenever they want. Now that they have their own space, Easterling said they’ve seen an increase in traffic.
“We’ve also been able to connect more people to services because before we just had a central phone line that people called who were trying to navigate getting into treatment, but now people can stop in,” she said. “So we’ve helped people get employment, helped people get connected with detox services and treatment services.”
O.U.R. Place offers a long list of services, resources and community events for those in recovery.
“One of the good things about what we do is we build bridges to other already existing community programs that maybe aren’t getting a lot of traffic,” Easterling said. “We have the fun stuff. We have Soberoke, we have dinners, we have hikes and picnics and bonfires. So that kind of pulls people in and gets their attention. So then that helps us connect them to stuff like credit counseling.”
Even longer is the list of partnerships O.U.R. Place has with other local organizations. Along with the partnership with a credit counselor at Family and Community Services who is working to offer a financial wellness course, they also partner with the Portage Master Gardeners and the Haven of Portage County where they have a Community Food Forest. They’ve partnered with Kent State in the past on events like Running2bWell, as well as Ohio Means Jobs and Opportunities for Ohioans with Disabilities. Easterling also said they’ll soon be offering Trauma Centered Yoga groups regularly provided by the local health department.
O.U.R. Place also partners with the Portage County Health Department through Project DAWN to offer harm reduction resources, such as learning the signs of an overdose and how to distribute Naloxone.
“We do harm reduction outreaches, because we know that when people get connected with harm reduction — once they make that touch point — oftentimes, then they know where to go for recovery when they’re ready,” Easterling said.
Partnering with other organizations and connecting people with the resources available in the community is something Easterling said is key to what they do at O.U.R. Place.
“[O.U.R. Place] is really accessible. It’s on the bus route,” Easterling said. “It’s just kind of a great touch point to have people in the recovery community who have training and access to these resources so we can get people connected in ways that maybe they wouldn’t have gotten connected before.”
O.U.R. Place is currently operating and hosting events and meetings. Easterling said there is still some work to be done in the space, but they plan to have an official ribbon cutting open house event in April.
At this time, O.U.R. Place is 100% volunteer based, Easterling said. They’re working on securing funding to pay staff in the future, but for now it’s fully powered by volunteers.
Anyone interested in volunteering at O.U.R. Place can check out their website and Facebook page to stay up-to-date. Every Tuesday at 6 p.m. they host an informational meeting for volunteers.
Maria McGinnis is a contributing writer for The Portager.