You’ve heard the term “Transitional”, but what is it really?
By: Brittany Tolle, LISW, Program Director of Outpatient Services
The transitional living program, operated by The Counseling Center, is an intensive outpatient program that assists clients in recovery on maintaining their sobriety while transitioning out of a more structured treatment program and back into the community. While assisting with this transition, clients are provided with safe, secure, and affordable housing that will allow them the proper foundation to focus on other aspects of their life that will increase their likelihood of successful reintegration back into the community. These other areas focus not only on the person’s addiction, but also on access and assistance with addressing primary care needs, preventative care, mental health counseling, and introduction to other community resources.
Clients of the transitional program are assigned a primary alcohol and drug counselor, case manager, and mental health counselor that they meet with weekly. This assigned team supports daily needs such as transportation services to and from scheduled appointments, access to food services, resolving legal obligations, and aiding in job readiness including entrance into vocational programming, interviewing skills, resume building, and linkage to partners in the community seeking sober employees. Services offered are prepared to be tailored around each individual client’s needs in order to increase their availability to these services to provide them the opportunity to return to productive members of society.
In the future, TCC’s transitional program looks to further increase access to secure housing by increasing bed availability. Presently, the number of beds accessible is near 150, but will soon be increasing capacity to over 200 beds available, across three counties in Southern Ohio. We will continue our efforts in providing a whole-person approach in which we will treat a person’s addiction, but also provide a client the opportunity to address other needs in their life. We also aim to further increase our capacity to offer clients the opportunity to live in independent housing once they have gained the skills and confidence to meet their own needs without the clinical structure and support of the transitional program. In addition to client-focused support, we look to increase our resources to families to assist with expanding a person’s support system, while attempting to help rebuild damaged relationships, through access to family counseling and community-based groups.
