SAN ANTONIO – Lifetime Recovery has completed an $18 million renovation of its century-old Southton facility, expanding capacity and adding services the nonprofit says will bring dignity and privacy to people in treatment for substance abuse.
The remodeling and campus expansion created 154 beds and opened the program to women for the first time, officials said.
Counseling offices are more private, and the space around the building appears “peaceful and dignified,” according to alumni who toured the facility.
Hamilton Barton, an alumnus who is now the nonprofit’s chief sustainability officer, says the need for support is ongoing, “but somebody’s got to help. No money, no mission.”
Barton, who was in the program in 2012 and 2013, recalled an enclosed corridor that staff once jokingly called “skid row.” He said he sometimes slept in the corridor and that the building was “not great” then, with stained ceilings and drafts.
Even in disrepair, he said, it was “a step up” and “a roof over our head.”
Treatment at Lifetime Recovery costs more than $300 a day, officials said. The residential portion of the program requires about $2.5 million a year to operate, and the nonprofit has launched the Lifetime Recovery Promise Scholarship Fund to help people who want treatment but can’t afford it.
“There are plenty of options if you have resources,” Lifetime Recovery CEO David Phipps said. “If you do not have insurance, if you do not have financials, if you do not have family support, where are you going to go? So therefore, we are the spot that helps with that in Bexar County. And South Texas, we draw from around as well.”
Alumni such as Barton say they trust the care provided. Barton said his youngest son, one of five children, is currently in the program. “I know that the programs here are the best you’re going to find,” he said. “So my baby, my youngest of five children, when he came to me and said that ‘I need help,’ this is where he needed to come.”
For more on how to give to the facility, click here.
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