Recovery Can’t Wait with Chris Budnick

In this episode of The Successful Life Podcast, Corey Berrier sits down with Chris Budnick, Executive Director of Healing Transitions, to discuss addiction recovery, homelessness, detox services, peer-led recovery, and rebuilding lives through community support.

Chris shares the story behind Healing Transitions, formerly The Healing Place of Wake County, and explains how the organization helps people struggling with substance abuse, homelessness, and mental health challenges through low-barrier detox, emergency shelter, recovery housing, peer mentorship, and long-term support.

Chris also opens up about his own recovery journey, getting sober at 19 years old, and how mentors, recovery meetings, and service work changed the direction of his life. The conversation covers second chances, employment in recovery, women’s recovery programs, family reunification, and the ripple effect recovery has on families and communities.

This episode is packed with insight for anyone impacted by addiction, recovery, homelessness, or the challenge of rebuilding life after substance abuse.

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Transcript

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Corey Berrier 0:31

Welcome to the Successful Life Podcast. I'm your host, Corey Barrier, and I'm here with my buddy Chris Butnik. What's up, brother?

SPEAKER_01 0:38

Hey, Corey. Thanks for having me.

Corey Berrier 0:40

Yeah, man. Good to see you. Good to see you, too. So I really I'm pretty excited to talk to you, Chris. You and I have had a lot of interactions as of recently, and uh you've been a lot of help to me with New Path employment. And uh so I wanted to talk to you about what you do at the healing transitions. I almost called it the wrong name because I'm still stuck in 15 years ago over how long ago it has been. But yeah, just if you could give us a quick introduction and let everybody know who you are and what you do, and then we'll roll from there.

SPEAKER_01 1:18

Sounds great. My name's Chris Budnick. I've been very fortunate to have been involved with Healing Transitions, which opened as the Healing Place of Wake County in 2001. To have been involved since its inception, been serving in the executive director role since April of 2016. So my function has changed significantly in the last decade. But as we mark 25 years of operations this year, it's an incredible blessing to be able to text people like Lawrence on Monday morning and say, hey, Lawrence, congratulations on 25 years of recovery. And reach out to people like Randy and Drew and Jerome and West so far this year, and just acknowledge that not only have they uh achieved uh decades of recovery, but their lives have in many ways exceeded anything that I think we envisioned at the beginning when we first opened. There's focused on how to get people off the street, reduce some of the negative aspects and really beginning to recognize and appreciate the flourishing that's going on in people's lives today.

Corey Berrier 2:30

Yeah, so so Chris, let's just in case people don't know what Healing Transitions offers and what the facility I guess facilitates. Uh, can you walk us through the different phases and how people come in and who comes in and all of that good stuff?

SPEAKER_01 2:53

So the healing transitions emerged out of an identified community need. County commissioners in the 90s had asked for a group to look into homelessness in Way County. The discoveries at the time were that there were no shelters that allowed people to come in if they were under the influence of alcohol or other drugs. Because of that, there was a fairly high unsheltered population that had alcohol and other drug use going on. And a big kind of concern was the frequency of transports by EMS to local emergency departments, primarily WakeMed. In 1997, they did 2,000 transports. EMS did 2,000 transports of individuals who were homeless and intoxicated, and two individuals made up 19% of those transports. And largely they were just sitting in Wake Med's emergency department until they sobered up because there was not an adequate number of detox beds in the community. So the county commissioners had tasked the county to look into finding a detox solution, which was a recommendation of this task force. And a public health nurse named Linda Strother discovered the healing place model in Louisville, Kentucky. And so the people that went there were both from municipal entities, county government, city government, but also from the nonprofit sector, from first responder sector, uh hospital systems. And what they saw in Louisville, three people became real inspired to bring back to Raleigh, and those were two people with capital broadcasting, Fred Barber and Barbara Goodman, and then Maria Spauldine, who is the director of Waycount Human Services at the time. And they wanted, they replicated exactly what they saw going on there. So Louisville had this sobering up center, which was a non-medical or social setting detox that was low barrier, would accept a lot of referrals from hospitals and law enforcement and EMS. And these were the target population were adults who were experiencing homelessness and had alcohol and other drug problems. So they had a low barrier detox. They had a wet shelter, which would be a low barrier shelter today, which meant being intoxicated or under the influence does not prohibit you from getting an emergency shelter. Everyone's entitled to basic human entitlement, food shelter, and clothing. You just can't bring alcohol in with you or other drugs in with you, but you can come in under the influence. And then they had this peer-run recovery program, which was the majority of the beds that served as a way to get out of those two crisis services of shelter and detox. And another way to think of it is crisis or relief services. Like these services are providing relief to people. But to really look at how do people transform and get out of those circumstances, the recovery program is what really impressed people that it was more than just alleviating overcrowding of emergency departments. It was more than alleviating demand on first responders, but it was actually making recovery possible. And with recovery, became something that not only benefited the individual, but benefited their families in our communities. And so Capital Broadcasting provided funding for an interim executive director starting in 1999. And that was filled by a guy that I used to work with named Dennis Parnell. We'd worked at Charter and Holly Hill together, and he had become WakeMed's first substance use disorder specialist. He left WakeMed to become the interim executive director and then became the founding executive director from 1999 to 2016. He brought me on as an intern in 1999 when I was getting my master's of social work at ECU and then hired me in September of 2000. And we got our men's campus opened. And then five years later, we opened a women's campus, which men's opened up as 165-bed facility and the women's as an 88-bed facility. In addition to those three course services, we replicated something that Louisville did, which was healthcare coordination. So they had a clinic that was run by volunteer healthcare professionals, and they had a staff member that coordinated that. So we hired a healthcare coordinator and started engaging healthcare professionals to do clinics. We also hired transition case managers to help with men at the end of the program with things that are of interest to you. Where do people go to work? Who's going to hire them? With often a history of being unemployed, underemployed, and often having a criminal background. Where are they going to live that's going to help them sustain their recovery? And then when our women's campus opened in 2006, we added a child and family specialist to provide support and reunification efforts to the women in our program. And then we've continued to evolve. So we've added a family and friends education and support group that's been going for about 16 years. It's just free to the public, whether you have a loved one at healing transitions or not. Since COVID, it's been meeting on Zoom. It's appealed to people who are geographically outside of the Way County area, allowing them to participate. 2016, we added a recovery outreach coordinator to increase the amount of support we're providing to people after they left, just in terms of staying in touch. 2018, we launched a pilot with EMS and public health doing post-overdose response for individuals who had a Narcan administration by a paramedic. 2022, we added some case management services through a grant at our women's shelter so that it was not just night-by-night shelter now, but human resources and financial resources to help people get into housing from the emergency shelter. And then 2024, we engaged in a pilot with the city working on an encampment that they wanted to decommission without trespassing people with using peer support and case management and street outreach to help them engage in a process of getting employment and housing and so forth. So those are a lot of the things that we've grown into, but our core remains those emergency shelter detox and recovery program. And of all the things that we do, we exist prime primarily. Our goal is to help people who are homeless, uninsured, and underserved with alcohol and other drug problems initiate recovery and then build a life in recovery.

Corey Berrier 10:08

God knows that's a lot.

SPEAKER_01 10:52

But our budget this year is about 9 million. When we look at the cost per person per day who's receiving services under our roof, not the services that are out in the community, it's roughly been about $55 per person per day. And we've averaged about 430 people per night. So we could work on math by dividing 9 million by 12 to get that monthly cost. But the overall cost for the service to help somebody get into recovery is exceptionally low. We're different, we're not treatment, we're a peer-based recovery program. We have this trade-off where we're serving people who don't have any financial resources. Part of that is they're helping to run the facility. So they have job responsibilities and so forth. And so that keeps costs down. If we were traditional treatment, we would have a clinical model and we would have a clinician-to-patient ratio and so forth. So we're different. We're really kind of modeled after a social model recovery program. And the cost is relatively low when you think about the alternatives. So what's the cost of incarceration? What's the cost of emergency department or hospitalization? What's the cost to the community with somebody in addiction where they're not engaged in any services? What's the cost in terms of public health and public safety risks? And then the return on investment, when you look at what happens when people get into recovery, we look at, we ask each year people to share what did you have on your W-2s? You have been unemployed, underemployed, now you're in recovery, you're working. What did you have withheld? Or if you're self-employed, what did you pay in taxes? We estimate since we've been tracking this starting in 2008 that there's been over 71 million dollars in taxes that have been withheld or paid through people being employable. We look at now how many people are paying property tax, how many people pay rent. Rent is contributing to a property tax being paid somewhere. And so we see on one level just a lot of financial indicators that this is a good return on investment. And then we start looking at what's happening as people become parents again and have their children in their life. And how is that helping their child perform better in school and potentially have a different trajectory than their parent did? I look at people like Scott and Emily who own a business that employs people in recovery, but are also very engaged in their community supporting little league baseball. I think of people who have gone on to become involved as Boy Scout troop leaders with their son because their recovery is providing a foundation for them to do what everyone else does, be involved in their community, being involved in their family's life.

Corey Berrier 14:15

Yeah. Wow, what a ripple effect. And so uh y you went to school to do this, but there's also more to that story. And so I'd like to hear a little bit more about your personal journey in recovery.

SPEAKER_01 14:35

Yeah, thanks for asking that. I went to school for this, but that was not the starting point, right? And so I'm coming up on 36 years of recovery. I I got into recovery as I was turning 19. My story is one of various issues. I had a traumatic head injury when I was eight that where a brick was thrown off a roof, hit me in the side of the head. Was put on phenobarbital, was back in school the next week at a new school in a new city, or I didn't really know anyone, but I'm the kid with a shaved head who has to put on his hockey helmet when he gets up from his desk and kids are going out to recess, and I'm putting on my helmet to go to the library for recess time. Uh I'm the kid who's started experiencing a lot of depression at a young age, introduced to counselors at a young age. Introduced to substances at a young age, growing up in the 80s as treatment is beginning to explode, that also means that treatment for adolescents is exploding. And my friend gets sent off to a program that's a 13-month basically therapeutic community for kids, and go to my first recovery meeting with him when he gets out, under the idea that I kept saying I'll stop using before my friend gets out so I can be a support for him and kept secret to him that I hadn't stopped using, but went to my first recovery meeting at age 16. Uh, was sent to school counselors by the school, sent to counselors by my parents. Parents split. My dad left the family when I was turning 16. Very isolating experiences associated with that. But at the same time, I'm I'm being connected to services and getting exposed to recovery. And my 18 moms just like you're too disruptive, you can't live here. Here are conditions for my support for you, et cetera, et cetera. Get into an outpatient treatment program, outpatient counselors, like we're gonna recommend inpatient treatment, go into inpatient treatment, and a lot of issues, but also like just a kid. And so was hopeful that was hopeful that going in there would fix me. That was my immature mindset. Uh and what happened were not things that I could recognize in the moment, but were things that in hindsight I see a guiding hand playing a role in. So while I'm in inpatient treatment, I build a relationship with a counselor named Ann, and she asks me the day I'm being discharged, she says, Will you come to my recovery meeting and present me with my uh, I think it was maybe 14 or 16 year recovery coin. And so that very first day I'm out of treatment, not only am I at this meeting, but as a kid that felt isolated, alienated, and excluded a lot growing up, here I was being included. And then I go and I apply for a job at a restaurant that that's located at a university. And the guy says, I can give you some part-time hours. And the first day I work with him, it's just me and him. The restaurant's closed, and we're just doing some deep cleaning. And you sit down, take a break, he's drinking a cup of coffee, and he says, I'm 13 years sober today, and I can look another person in the eye. Like I'm really good with myself. I said, I just got out of treatment on Thursday, like three days ago. He's like, the guy who works the dishwasher, he's in recovery. People that are at the university that are in recovery, they come to the kitchen, and we have a recovery meeting here on Tuesdays. And as I was getting back into school at this university, as uh most kids my age were not doing different things, he became this guardian angel for me. And if he's still alive uh in August, he'll mark 50 years of continuous recovery. And it's my intention to go back to Rhode Island and to uh to join him in that celebration. I try to see him most summers when I'm up visiting my family. We go to a recovery meeting together, and and I just have this profound profound gratitude that he came into my life. At the same time, I went back to a local recovery meeting that I had attended previously, and this time it was a little bit different, and it's really interesting because just last night I was looking through some of my photos that I have saved, that I've scanned, that I've digitized and have saved of one of those members who was an important mentor to me. And so this guy, John, who I've lost touch with, said, I'm gonna take you under my wing. And this other guy, Roy, who I've been able to maintain contact with, said, We want you to come back next week and we want you to make the coffee for this meeting. And my dilemma at that point was I was 19. I'd never, I wasn't a coffee drinker and I'd never made coffee. So I make coffee at this first meeting, and I'm like looking around the room at these 10 people trying to figure out like, what do they think of the coffee? How did I do? Are they going to accept me or whatever? And found that regardless of the quality of the coffee, like this gave me uh a commitment and a purpose. And without those things being placed in my life, I wouldn't have stayed in recovery and then wouldn't have had the opportunity to build a life. So I'm majoring in psychology as an undergrad, but as I'm getting some recovery under my belt, I'm beginning to realize like, hey, you're just majoring in the thing you're familiar with. You're used to going to being sent to counselors. You can just do and what does this actually mean? And I was really lucky that my university said for your last semester, you could do an internship. And that's what instead of classes, you're doing an internship. And I interviewed at they had three places for me to interview at. One was a psychiatric unit for children, one was a police department with a community education program, and one was a residential facility for folks with addiction. And that place gave me an internship, and I didn't realize how bad the workforce was for addiction professionals because they offered me a job as soon as I graduated, and within a couple months, I'm the senior person on second shift as a 22-year-old. Dating a girl, it's going to school down here, so I start looking for jobs in in this area and go to a place called Charter Northridge, which merged with Holly Hill in '95. Five and then dissolved the charter part of it. But charter had a lot of for-profit psychiatric units and hospitals in the state. So I'm completely underqualified for this case manager role. I'm underwhelming the nurse who's interviewing me. But she says there's a woman whose position that you're interviewing for, named Nancy. And she's from Rhode Island and she's homesick. So come back to meet Nancy. She's looking after, looking out for Nancy, who's homesick. I come back, meet with Nancy, and within 90 seconds realize she worked at the treatment center I went through back in Rhode Island. And now I get hired simply based on that type of connection, not because the director of nursing thinks I'm qualified. But she goes to work for Dennis Parnell, who was running the outpatient services. And so that's how I met Dennis. And then Dennis was the man who got hired to start the healing place and who hired me. So I see this hand of something greater kind of guiding and putting me on this path of where it doesn't feel like there were a lot of accidents. Like there were a lot of things, like how many people get out of treatment in the job they apply for is with somebody that's sober and has a meeting there at that restaurant. There's just so many things that kind of put me on this path. And so my as I've gotten clarity in why I went back for school for social work was working in this field, they wanted people to have credentials and the social work degree, from what I could gather, gave you the most flexibility at a time when you may be uncertain of do you want to do private practice, work at a facility, do you advocacy, and so forth.

Corey Berrier 24:29

So very fascinating. So how many years did you spend at Holly Hill?

SPEAKER_01 24:37

Yeah, so I got hired in September of 94 at Charter Northridge, which was up on Newton Road in Raleigh, which is off of Six Forks. And by 95, they had merged with Holly Hill, and there was this transition period where services were going over. And the chemical dependency unit and the adolescent unit were the last two units to finally go over. So I feel like in fall of 95 is when they fully closed down the charter location. We were then at Holly Hill. And I left Holly Hill full-time in maybe May or June of 98, and then worked as a PR in a PRN basis as I was getting ready to start school at ECU in August of 98. And then did an internship at Darthia Dix Hospital. The woman that was my supervisor helped me get a job at Wake County part-time with my addiction credential. And so I worked at what was called Evaluation and Emergency Services. That later became crisis and assessment services. But while I was there, people would come voluntarily or come involuntarily. You would assess them and determine what resource they needed. So if they needed to go to the Alcoholism Treatment Center or Darthea Dick Hospital, if they needed to be involuntarily committed. And I did that on like Friday nights and Saturdays while I was in grad school. Worked for a couple months at Dick's Darthea Dix Hospital in the summer of 2000 before I got hired here. And then the other I've been teaching at NC State in their social work department since 2002 in addiction recovery social work class. That's a little bit of my kind of resume.

Corey Berrier 26:39

Interesting. Yeah, I visited Holly Hill a couple of times. Uh more than a couple, sometimes as a patient, sometimes as not a patient. Yeah. Not a fun not a fun place, but definitely was there when I didn't even want it, to be honest. But it was I I needed somewhere to go and and uh and dry out, and that was definitely the place, and now I've taken many guys down there and helped them get in uh for sure. So that's really interesting. I didn't know that part about you. And okay, very fascinating. And so now you have around 250 guys there right now, there at the healing transitions. Let's talk about the women's side of things. And I'm curious, do you find that the women or or the men have a tougher time staying in recovery? Do you have any idea?

SPEAKER_01 27:47

If you ever thought about that, I'll tell you one thing that's been a consistent thought. We do these uh what we call silver silver chip ceremonies or transition ceremonies where we recognize men and women who've completed the program. And every time I'm at a women's ceremony, a guaranteed thought enters my head, which is my goodness, I would have thrown in the towel so long ago. And they have somehow continued to persevere and push through unimaginable obstacles, setbacks, traumas, and so forth. And so, from my perspective, just looking at my experience with recovery, I don't often do that at the men's, but the women's, I often just have this incredible sense of admiration for their perseverance and commitment to working through adversity. What we do know is that uh, and as we studied, where you move once you leave the either campus has a lot to do with what your recovery will look like. And so we started to recognize that if people moved to a place by themselves, people moved back with their family, if people said, Hey, me and Joe who came through the program together and became real tight friends, are going to get a place together, that folks who did that were less likely to be in recovery a year later. And we also noticed that if people moved within a five-mile radius of the campus, when they moved out, they're more likely to be in recovery, and you keep going out 25 miles, 100 miles, less likely to stay in recovery. And so that's informed us around the idea that a big investment here of time and work is great for a foundation, but there is a new set of tasks that people need to master when they finish this program. They're now working, they're now living life on life's terms, they're not in a structured environment, they're not surrounded by people who are working towards the same thing. So, we, in addition to building up that relationship with the larger recovery community, where you live and how you stay connected is generally by rule of thumb a really important thing. And there's always outliers and exceptions. My friend Carrie, who came through the program, his brother was in Wake County, he was in Miami, he'd been in and out of homeless shelters and treatment down there. I think it was 2009 or so that he came through in 2010 when he was finishing. He's like, I'm going back to Miami. And I'm like, listen, all of our data would say that creates an extra risk factor for you. Let's do this. If you're committed to this plan, let's make a commitment to email each other once a week. So we set up this like this has some risk to it, so let's add some additional strategy. And he went to halfway house down there. He I texted him today. Like, we've moved away from email to texting, and so we've got this relationship that's been weekly contact for looking him up for since he left in May of 2010. Dang. So 16 years we've been staying in touch with one another. And it came about because he was making a choice that was statistically associated with greater risk, and we're saying, okay, if there's more risk, what are some things that you can do to try to mitigate that? And he was had a commitment and a readiness to engage in that. So what we tend to see different from men's and women's, and it's been a little while since I've looked at this data, but when I was more data focused, at the women's campus, it was less important whether you finished the entire program than at the men's campus. So at the women's campus, if you got through the educational part of the program, you had a pretty good likelihood of being in recovery a year later. If you were at the men's campus and only got through the educational program, you weren't as likely to be in recovery one year later. So sometimes the messaging at the women's campus is like, hey, if you can just get through this educational part of the program, know it's stressful, no, it's tough, you're statistically going to put yourself in a position to be more likely to be in recovery one year later. At the men's campus, the message would be no, this is tough, know that you're around a lot of people, and it's not. But if you can get through the entire program, you're going to increase your chances. It doesn't mean that you can't plenty of people leave here and do things like I'm getting into an Oxford house, I'm going to meetings, I'm doing all these sort of things. That's great. So we're not saying it's not possible, but if we're looking at what our statistics show, you're more likely to do this if you finish the whole thing. So those are some of the differences that that we've seen. And then for one of the things we're excited about is at our women's campus, we finished expansion. So we went from an 88-bed facility to a 210-bed facility in 2024. We're now working on a housing program, which will be apartments at our women's campus, 17 units, combination of two-bedroom and four-bedroom units, and allow us to uh offer this type of apartment style housing to women who are reunifying with their children, like building relationships, and women who are trying to regain custody of their children and to extend the amount of support that we can provide to them because women, and this is where some of that admiration comes in for like I watch women who finish the program and they are making a tough decision to say, I'm not going to rely on this unhealthy relationship to financially support me. I'm going to get this job, and I don't have my own vehicle, so I'm catching the bus, two connections each way, and I'm working, and I've got my kid back in my life, and we're living it at Oxford House for women and children, and I'm making time for meetings, and I'm making time for sponsorship and service work and so forth. And it's like, wow, that is all that is a ton. I bet you could use some additional support. So we're hoping that we can stay with women for a longer period of time as they start to navigate these different challenges that are different from what they had when they were coming through the program, but can be sources of stress, sources of feeling frustrated, sources of feeling overwhelmed. If we can do that and strengthen them during this period of time, it can make their recovery more durable. And then that can have, as we talked about that ripple effect, can have continued benefit that extends beyond just the individual.

Corey Berrier 35:27

Yeah. Wow. Is there do you do you also do you also have something like that for the men, like the apartments, the similar situation, or are you just doing it for the women because of the the the I guess the children aspect and the women I ultimately are more vulnerable in terms of I guess men?

SPEAKER_01 35:55

We're doing it because of uh a family foundation. Our la our last capital campaign that we finished at the women's, we're almost done at the men's. It's been like a 10-year project. Recovery can't wait. That can't campaign was all about making sure we had adequate capacity to serve people, or if not, that we were going to have to make a decision to start turning people away. And so we opted for let's increase our capacity as opposed to starting to turn people away. And in that fundraising process and engagement with donors, there was a family foundation that was interested in women in particular. And so, in engaging them for support for our last campaign, they said, What don't you have at your women's campus that you'd like to have? Do you need a playground? Do you need a something? And I said, We've always talked about how nice it would be to have some housing for women and their children because what we had seen was we'd seen women who would go to an Oxford house for women and children. And we love Oxford House at Healing Transition. And but the recognition was there's not additional support services there. It's women not in their own space with their kids, but like sharing a house together. And then we would see women who would go to a place like Passage Home and be given an apartment. Like they have their own space for them and their kid, but the apartment complex was not recovery-oriented. And so part of it was like, we like the passage home model of this is your own place. We love the recovery culture and orientation of an Oxford house. Let's like try to pair those strengths together. Do it on-site because this has the potential to not only help them, but help women earlier in the program. So you think about a woman who's in the program. You can identify with this, I can identify with this. Every person in recovery has fear about the future. Somebody going to accept me back? My family gonna forgive me. Am I gonna get out of this debt? Am I gonna who's gonna hire me? Am I just always gonna feel like I'm digging myself out of a hole? For the women who are in the program, imagine them at some point coming to believe that I think I can stop using. I have enough belief that recovery is possible. But they're stuck in all those other things about what's next. If they can see a woman who's living in one of those apartments, has her kids with her, is working, is taking on some new skills. And we think that that will help that woman feel more optimistic about her future. So having it located there and it kind of I mean it's what's core to the recovery community is having examples that you can look to to offer you hope. And so our reason for that housing was a donor who specifically was interested in this population asking what don't you have at your women's campus that you'd like to have?

Corey Berrier 39:36

I'm curious, and I'm not sure if I can even ask this, but I'm gonna ask it anyway. Did Damon have part in some of this stuff?

SPEAKER_01 39:48

Well, the AJ Fletcher Foundation has been an inaugural founding supporter and an ongoing supporter. So they are the philanthropic branch of capital broadcasting. So when Fred Barber and Barbara Goodman from Capital Broadcasting said we want to make this happen, Capital Broadcasting said we'll give the funding from interim director and we'll provide office space at the AJ Fletcher Foundation. They've not been necessarily, they don't do this with many, they're not like annual donors every year, but they get involved with certain things. So they were really helpful in their financial support for the recovery can't wait campaign. This turned into a $24 million campaign. And their initial support, I said, if you raise six million, we'll give you a million over five years. And it was actually that challenge that led me to eventually have this conversation with this other family foundation of them trying to meet this challenge that the A.J. Fletcher Foundation has set for us that we have to get to six million by October of 2020. Will you help me with this? That then turned into them saying, Yeah, we'll help you with that, but we're really interested in your women's campus and what's going on there and what the needs are, what the opportunities are. Yeah, so the AJ Fletcher Foundation has been helpful to us, but helpful to the nonprofit community in Wake County in many ways that extend beyond financial support.

Corey Berrier 41:34

Sure. Yeah. Yeah. I figured that I figured they had certainly I knew that they were a big supporter of HT and have played a good part in some of the success there. Chris, I know we're about out of time, and uh I one, I just want to thank you for sharing all this. It's so much so educational for me because I didn't know a lot of this stuff. Is if someone listening to this is struggling, where can they go and who can they reach out to if maybe a family member hears this and maybe it's their kid, or maybe it's a someone's dad, whoever it is, that could use the services at HT, where would they go to find that?

SPEAKER_01 42:25

Yeah, so like our website is healing-transitions.org. So that's one one place. We welcome people to come out and take tours, and that can be scheduled and planned in advance, or you can just show up and say, hey, I've got a loved one with a problem. I'm trying to find some potential resources for them. I'm interested in learning more about healing transitions. Our detox is open 24-7, so people can get dropped off, brought in for detox services. If we feel that their intoxication risk or their overdose risk is high, we may refer them to a medical facility. But detox is always frequently a starting point. We often get people who are incarcerated whose families may reach out to us and say, I'm hoping my loved one could get help with you, and we will facilitate like getting one of our screening forms to them and trying to decide if they meet our criteria to come in, which is are you essentially homeless from Wake County and have an alcohol and other drug problem and able to participate in the program? We also have a family education support program that meets virtually on Wednesday nights from 6:30 to 8. And so a lot of times loved ones will initiate attendance there to learn about resources and support and learn other people's experience with both healing transitions or trying to get their loved one help, reaching out to us. People can email me at cbudnik at healing hyphen or healing dash transitions.org. We will connect with Rhonda, who runs our family education support program. Other people get involved through some of the community aspects. So our post overdose response team does some jail inreach for the Way County Detention Center, where if somebody's Incarcerated there or locked up there. We can go in and connect with them. So families have sometimes said my loved ones at the Way County Detention Center, and we can then go in and start talking to them about a plan. And then our post-overdose response team also has been available to not only support the individual, but offer resources to families if they've had a loved one that's had an overdose reversal or even a fatal overdose.

Corey Berrier 44:56

Perfect. And all that information, I'm assuming, can be found at the website, which I will link in the show notes. Yep. Chris, appreciate you, my friend. It's really been great. Thank you so much. Thanks for all your help. And it's really been a pleasure, man.

SPEAKER_01 45:12

Yeah, thanks for uh what you're doing.

Corey Berrier 45:14

Appreciate it, Chris. You're welcome, brother. We'll talk soon. Bye bye.