Not when you have a job. Not when you get clean. Not when you’ve earned it. Right now, exactly where you are. That’s where we start.
Where this began The SeedsJoy is not something you earn back after recovery. It is how recovery begins.
He hadn’t laughed in two years. Then someone handed him a puppy.
Be clean first. Have insurance. Be stable enough to fill out the forms. Be ready. The people who most need recovery support can’t meet those thresholds yet — and so every system designed to help them turns them away at the door, sometimes without meaning to.
We built RHSH as a flank to those systems. Not in opposition to them — alongside them, in the space they can’t reach. We go to where people are. We pay them to come. We start with ice cream and a puppy and a table where everyone belongs. Recovery grows from there, if and when a person is ready.
No insurance. No sobriety requirement. No eligibility threshold. We pay you to show up. No strings.
Every seed plants the same thing: the sense that you are a person who deserves to be here.
Nobody starts using because life is good. Root Cause addresses the trauma underneath — through peer coaching, grounding, animal-assisted activity, shared labor, and giving back. We build the person back up before we ask anything of them.
Addiction takes your sense of being human. Humanity events give it back — spa days, puppies in the park, a fancy dinner, a rafting trip. No recovery messaging at the door. You just get to be a person for a day.
We arrive with a framework and a budget. We don’t arrive with a calendar. The community tells us what it needs. We build from what we hear, not from what we assume.
You don’t have a job. You sleep outside. You still deserve ice cream and laughter and someone who knows your name.
We pay people to come because we trust them. That trust is the first thing we give.
The program runs in three tiers. At the base: open events, cash compensation, no requirements. In the middle: smaller, more personal experiences as trust builds. At the top: the people who came through the program become the ones who run it for the next person.
That’s not a staffing strategy. That’s the whole point. The program is designed to grow the people who will make it unnecessary for us to run it forever.
See the full model →Garrett is RHSH’s Certified Peer Recovery Coach. His recovery wasn’t linear. There were relapses, years of genuine uncertainty. What finally changed wasn’t a program. It was someone looking at him like he was a person — not a problem, not his addiction, not someone who needed to earn back his worth. Just a person. Now.
He has been in sustained recovery for over two years. Today he walks alongside people at the earliest and hardest stages of their own road — not as a counselor, but as evidence that it goes somewhere.
Everyone told me what I needed to do to deserve help. Get clean. Get housed. Get stable. Nobody said: you’ve been carrying this alone and you don’t have to anymore. You matter exactly as you are. That’s the only thing that changed anything.
Garrett Robinson, CPRC — Peer Recovery Coach — draft, for Garrett to confirmIf you’re on the road — or you love someone who is — we’d be glad to know you.