Everyone Needs a Place to Heal

WHEN KATHY KILLIAN NOE arrived in Seattle in 1999, she already had a lifetime of experience as a passionate advocate for the forgotten and the despised. She studied her new city with a simple question in mind: Where was the deepest need? She saw thousands of people struggling with mental illness and substance use disorders. She dreamed of finding a way to offer something those people were missing—something that might be called the advantages of family.

For lucky people, family means a reliable network of human beings who will never abandon you, who are always ready to give you the benefit of the doubt, whose love is reliable as rain. Family is the solace of being known and cherished. It’s having someone call you to check in, or bake you a cake, or just be happy to see you. It’s having people who need you. Some of us are born into families like this, and some of us find them in loving faith communities that create families of choice.

Noe faced a whole population suffering from the lack of that kind of support—people who often didn’t even know what it feels like to be cared for over the long haul in a thousand small but crucial ways. “Nine out of 10 Recovery Café members have experienced childhood trauma,” Noe said, “and many have suffered one trauma after another.” That these people also suffered from a variety of addictions and other mental health challenges only made their isolation more heartbreaking.

The most important ingredient in any meal is love. If one chooses the food, prepares the food, and presents the food with love, there will always be spiritual nourishment baked in along with the calories and flavors. And so, with the support of a small group of friends and New Creation Community—an ecumenical faith community in the tradition of Washington, D.C.’s Church of the Saviour—Noe set out to find a way to fill the need for that kind of nourishment. The result was Recovery Café.

Today it sits on a noisy street in a busy area of downtown Seattle. If you come through the bright front door expecting a sort of dismal soup kitchen, you’ll be astonished. Physically, the café is both lovely and lively. The colors and textures speak of home: soothing linen-tinted walls with accents in brick, pumpkin, and dark sea green. Plenty of natural wood adds to the sense of comfort, as do graceful hanging pendant lights and the arc of polished granite that forms the coffee bar. Dinner on a recent day included pasta tossed with bright chunks of yellow and red peppers, salmon dressed with fresh dill, and baskets of fragrant bread. Wide, clean windows look out on passing traffic and pedestrians.

You’ll find people sitting together at small square tables, eating and chatting comfortably like the old friends that they have become. There will be people reading, doing puzzles, or using one of the computers set up near the door. There are men and women who use wheelchairs and others who look like they spend a lot of time at the gym. And you’ll see people sitting alone, quietly keeping their eyes down. Usually those people are new; it takes time to understand that this place is about much more than a beautiful meal.

‘The first time anyone cared’

It takes time to bring yourself to accept what’s offered, especially when your life has taught you that you have no value. In her book about the founding of Recovery Café, Descent into Love, Noe told the story of William. William suffered from addiction, but he had been working hard at his recovery and made it his business to spend a lot of time at the café, until the day he got some bad news and relapsed. Normally that would mean weeks or months of isolation and using, but William was waiting on the doorstep of the café the very next morning when Noe came to work. When she asked him why he’d been so quick to get himself back, he said, “This is the first time anyone cared whether I returned or not.”

William embodies an important truth. It’s not enough to offer a safe, beautiful space and delicious food; he didn’t come back for the free lunch. He came back because membership in the café is mutual. It mirrors the natural state of affairs between any people who share a loving bond. The café creates family-like mutuality and accountability through a model of membership that is both elegant and sturdy. They are “members,” not clients, because clients are people who receive services. Members give and receive and, most important, belong.

There are only three requirements: 1) Be free of drugs and alcohol for 24 hours; 2) attend a weekly meeting with a small, loving accountability group called a Recovery Circle; and 3) contribute to the community by maintaining the physical space and helping to create a culture of healing and unconditional love.

The heart of this program beats on these simple requirements. The first is an acknowledgment that addiction is real and damaging, but it’s also a recognition that the idea of “never again” is a terrifying barrier to someone who has been using drugs or alcohol addictively. Twenty-four hours is doable.

The Recovery Circles are a window into the deep power of Recovery Café. Meeting regularly with people who are prepared to love you for yourself is an intensely spiritual process. Doing so under the leadership of a trained member or community volunteer ensures that the process will be healthy. The circles allow struggling people to do their struggling safely, in the presence of a small, committed group of friends—and also, on better days, to celebrate with those same friends. Over time, the circles create a space to discover what has been missing for so many members of the café: a way through brokenness that grows organically and requires only willingness to be present and tell your truth. People who have never experienced being deeply known and loved not only feel the power in that, but they also learn the joy of offering it to others.

The third requirement takes the larger community and its home seriously. Like members of a family, members of the café pitch in with the dishes. They also take out the trash, sweep and mop the floors, work in the kitchen, and clean the bathrooms. Café members facilitate Recovery Circles, serve as recovery coaches, and advocate for more just city and state policies affecting their neighbors who are living on the margins. Doing all of this is what makes the café theirs. A formerly homeless member with serious mental health challenges told me that if not for the café, he would only have the room in which he sleeps. Smiling and gesturing with pride at the space, he said, “This is my living room.”

In its 2016 financial statement, Recovery Café Seattle reported that its members donated more than 13,000 hours to the operation of the organization; local community volunteers matched that with more than 13,000 hours of their own time.

What I’ve described is the basic model of Recovery Café. It’s a physical space made beautiful and warm through careful choices in furnishing and color. It has a kitchen and offers free meals—made with love—twice a day, five days a week, all year long. It creates conditions for the kind of healing that can only happen over time and with the patient, compassionate presence of other human beings. It transforms suffering into hope.

A replicable model

It turns out that model can be replicated; indeed, it already has been. Recently I talked with Dana Bainbridge, who is the part-time pastor of First Christian Church in San Jose, Calif., and also part-time staff for the new Recovery Café San Jose, proudly housed in the church.

A few years ago Bainbridge was brutally forced to recognize that what her congregation was doing to help its neighbors wasn’t working. “There was this really hard period where three or four people who were active in our meal program died over a short period of time, one of them literally on our doorstep,” Bainbridge said. “On the steps of our building.”

Bainbridge, who already knew of Noe’s work, had heard that she’d started some kind of new project in Seattle. As it happened, there were a couple of people in her church who also knew of Noe. The three of them decided to take a trip north to see what this café thing was about. Maybe it would be something they could do in San Jose.

That visit convinced them that not only was it something they could do—it was something they were inspired to do. A slow, thoughtful process began, during which the Seattle team made itself available for everything from routine questions to visits to San Jose. For two years, Bainbridge and her congregation worked their careful way through a mountain of questions, doubts, and possible repercussions. During that time there were more visits to Seattle, along with many, many phone calls and emails.

Recovery Café San Jose opened its doors on April 1, 2014.

First Christian Church had been a tiny congregation of 20 or 30 people using a building designed to hold 250 for worship. It’s still a small congregation, but it’s also become a busy, self-sustaining place where people’s lives are being transformed. Bainbridge is passionate about the way the café has opened up this possibility for partnership.

“People still come to churches in times of need, maybe because we’re easier to access than other social service organizations,” Bainbridge said. “But for some small churches like ours, the amount and depth of the need is overwhelming. So we either wall ourselves off because it’s too much, or we try to do things we’re not equipped to do. We were lucky. We had a chance to adopt the healing structure of the Recovery Café. That helped us launch a separate organization that includes—but is much more than—the caring ministry of our church.”

By spring 2017, Recovery Café San Jose—just three years into its work in the community—was thrilled to launch a major renovation of the church property. Part of the joy came at a fundraising event where three café members shared their stories of healing and brought a crowd of 400 supporters to their feet. The moment was a poignant, hard-won answer to the deaths that had sent the church in search of a better idea.

The model works outside of a church context, too. Recovery Café Everett, north of Seattle, opened in March 2015 after former Seattle café volunteer Wendy Grove was inspired to make it happen in her own community. Grove had been a classroom teacher and a writer; today she runs the Everett café out of a small, open-spaced house. Her team’s problem now—a little more than two years in—is that the building is too small to hold all the people who want to become members.

The best part of doing this work, Grove said, comes when she witnesses a softening in the protective armor worn by so many lost and forgotten people. One day, one of their members who had been waiting months to get into a treatment center had fallen short of the 24-hour sobriety requirement. They had to ask him to leave. As he walked off down the alley, a staff member called after him, in the voice of a friend who does not give up, “We love you!”

“I know,” came the reply. “That’s why I keep coming back.”

Recovery Café Spokane quietly opened its doors on Valentine’s Day, 2017. Director Georgia Butler was deliberate about taking things slowly. She’d been to the Seattle café, so she knew what was possible, but she also wanted to create a café that would meet the particular needs of her city. “You have to look at what your community needs are,” she said. “The biggest gap here is between inpatient and outpatient, and after outpatient. Those were the gaps.”

After seven months and with no outreach beyond word-of-mouth, Recovery Café Spokane was serving lunch to as many as 20 people every day. Their Recovery Circles have become an important healing place for people on medication-assisted treatment for methadone addiction, because many traditional 12-step groups don’t welcome such people. The word of the café’s radical hospitality is spreading; this fall local radio station KXLY chose the café for an Extreme Team Makeover.

At the other end of the scale is Interfaith Works, a major nonprofit operating in Montgomery County, Md., which borders Washington, D.C. Interfaith Works runs 14 programs that serve 16,000 people. Last year, CEO Shane Rock found himself at a meeting of business leaders, government officials, and community members. Rock, as it happened, had lived in Seattle and knew about the Recovery Café model—in fact, he’d had the idea of trying to replicate it on the East Coast for years. The subject of this meeting was how to deal with the “problem of street homelessness,” especially in the context of deep distrust for social service systems. A bell rang in the back of his mind. “It occurred to me that the Recovery Café model might be absolutely appropriate to create a community that was welcoming outside of the social service world ... there wasn’t anything like that here.” Very quickly, Rock had the attention of the head of county government, local nonprofit leaders, and his own board of directors. This fall, when Recovery Café Seattle presents a training program for interested groups, Rock will be there with members of his team.

Recovery Café Seattle now has a dedicated team to help interested people discern whether and how the model could work in their communities. The Recovery Café Network supports the whole process, from curiosity to launch to operation. Noe describes the goal: “We seek to partner with groups or organizations with a minimum of two or three people who are deeply called to this venture, believe in our core commitments, support multiple pathways to recovery, have experience in recovery, and can devote the time and resources to bring a Recovery Café to life.”

Just as individuals joining a particular café commit to certain requirements, groups or organizations interested in joining the network are asked to honor four core commitments: 1) Create a space that is drug and alcohol free; 2) empower every member to become a contributor; 3) nurture Recovery Circles as structures of loving accountability; 4) ensure responsible stewardship of assets.

Creating a new café, like creating a new family, is difficult and rewarding. It’s exciting and risky. It’s beautiful in the way that every risk taken in the name of love is beautiful, holy, and precious. The dream is that in every community, willing hearts will have the tools to create and sustain a place to heal and belong.