Our Cafe’s Mission
The Mission of the Everett Recovery Café is to empower long-term transformation through human connection and a safe, healing community for those in recovery from the trauma of homelessness, addiction, and mental health challenges.
Anyone is welcome to visit the Café as a guest for the day. The only requirement we ask is that anyone entering the space be 24 hours drug and alcohol free.
Our Challenge
Snohomish County experiences around 18% of all heroin-related deaths in Washington although the county comprises only 10% of the state’s population.
Mental health challenges often underlie addiction and many people manage their pain through substance abuse. This disproportionally hurts individuals who are low-income and homeless also struggling with mental health challenges who often stop taking or lose access to medication, triggering substance abuse relapse. Loss of access to housing, employment, and health care services is often a consequence. Without sustained recovery from mental health challenges and addiction, accessing existing housing and social service providers can feel insurmountable.
According to the National Institute of Health, recovering addicts need a foundation of at least two years sobriety to ensure long-term recovery. Everett Recovery Café provides this crucial support to those who want to rebuild their lives and break the cycle of homelessness, addiction, and other mental health challenges.
More recently, the social distancing and self-isolating recommended to combat the spread of the Covid-19 pandemic has been dangerous for those in recovery. In Snohomish County, opioid-related deaths rose 53% from the first quarter to the second quarter of 2020 – just as the Stay-at-Home orders were taking effect. Fentanyl-related deaths are up 162% for the same period.
In addition, there is plenty of anecdotal evidence of an increase in relapse and struggles with mental health. Member feedback also reveals an acute need for basic essentials. Various sources of food, shelter, clothing and transportation are no longer available or have become much more difficult to access.
Now, more than ever, we stand together to stand in the gap.
Our Work
Everett Recovery Café was founded on the belief that every human being is beloved regardless of past trauma, mental and emotional anguish, addictive behaviors or mistakes made.
We open our doors to people with heavy loads of failure, guilt, and shame.
Our space is beautiful to show our Members they are deserving of a beautiful, safe, drug and alcohol-free space. We are a loving community in order to anchor our Members (closely-supported consumers) in the sustained recovery needed to gain and maintain access to housing, social and health services, healthy relationships, education and employment.
Our program is designed to help people maintain recovery, reduce relapse and fulfill potential.
Important elements of this work include:
Radical Hospitality: We lead by putting extraordinary effort and emphasis on making people feel welcomed and remembered!
Recovery Circles: Small peer-support circle that meets the same time each week to share challenges and successes, give and receive feedback, and to become deeply known.
Community Meals: Homemade soup, salad, and bread to nurture our Members.
Classes: Allow for education, exploration of something new, and healing: art, book studies, relapse prevention, yoga, meditation, creative writing.
Service Work: The Café belongs to the community members, and to give back, and be a part of, all members contribute to service work at the Café, be it walking with a member to a doctor’s appointment or mopping the floor at the end of the day.
Recovery Coaching: Recovery Coaching is a huge part of our community. Treating people as resources is in what we do!
Peer Leadership: At the Café, we strive to lead leaders into a path where our members can advocate on a position that they thrive in.
We provide support, resources and a community of care along the entire continuum of a person’s need for recovery assistance. Whether in crisis, newer to recovery, in long-term recovery, after a relapse, during a difficult life change, or mental health transition, the Café is there as a refuge of care with evidence-based support and love.
We teach people ways to manage mental health, maintain sobriety, and build community. We help each individual reclaim life as a person worthy of giving and receiving love.
Through our work, we prevent individuals from another potentially life-ending crisis, saving taxpayer money in emergency intervention to help them stabilize, and allowing mental health and addiction support professionals to focus on health maintenance and addiction prevention.
