Sojourner Day in Fairfield
Tuesday August 14th was "Sojourner Recovery Services, Inc. and Mercy Hospital
Fairfield Day in the City of Fairfield"
This is in recognition of the Sojourner Concert Series. A
copy of the proclamation can be seen on here
http://www.sojournerrecovery.org/images/proclamation.htm
Adolescent Art Show at the Fitton Center
During the month of
August artwork created by Sojourner clients will be on
display in the Student Gallery of the
Fitton Center
for Creative Arts in Hamilton. The artwork was created
by clients from Sojourners Adolescent program. The
clients were participating in the Arts in Common Program
through the Fitton Center. Artist Mary Catherine Ruby
worked with the Sojourner adolescent residential clients
weekly with painting, drawing, and many other projects.
The Fitton Center is located at 101 South Monument
Avenue in Hamilton.
Click here to view a Mapquest map.
United Way Day of Caring
Sojourner participated in the April 20th United Way Day of Caring sponsored by
Duke Energy. Volunteers from Duke Energy helped give the landscaping at the new
administrative office a makeover. We are greatly appreciative of their efforts
and hard work. You can see more images on this
page.

Sojourner on the News
Two Sojourner clients and a Sojourner staff member
were interviewed for a Channel 5 News story. It aired April 5th and the link
below will take you to the video. "Super-Pure Meth Hits Tri-State Streets - WLWT
Cincinnati"
the video link
Adolescent Program Newsletter
View the Adolescent Program Newsletter by clicking on a link below:
PDF version
Flash version
If you don't
have it installed already, click this link to download the flash player.
Sojourner Concert
Series Fundraiser
Mercy Hospital
Fairfield is hosting The Sojourner
Concert Series at the
Fairfield Community Arts Center to raise funds for
Sojourner Recovery Services.
Read article from Journal News
Volunteer
Program
To learn more about Sojourner
Recovery Services and the exciting volunteer
opportunities that are now available. Contact Brent
Russell
The article below appeared in the
Hamilton Journal News on 7/31/06
Art helps recovering
adolescents cope
By Richard O Jones, Staff Writer
HAMILTON — Tabatha, 16, has become
“obsessed with polka dots.”
She presents a large painting of
dots in various shades of pink on a navy blue background
and a ceramic tile with a similar motif, along with
another tile decorated with the logo of her favorite
band.
Her art work will be exhibited for
the first time this week at the Fitton Center for
Creative Arts.
During August, artwork created by
clients from Sojourner’s Adolescent Residential program
will be on display in the Student Gallery of the Fitton
Center. The clients received art lessons from the Arts
in Common Program, which brings the arts to people who
might otherwise not be able to participate. Artist Amy
Edwards has been working with the Sojourner adolescent
clients weekly with painting, drawing, origami and other
projects.
A reception for the exhibition
will be 5 to 7 p.m. Thursday. The Fitton Center is
located at 101 S. Monument Ave. in Hamilton.
For Tabatha, who is in the seventh
week of her second round of residential treatment at
Sojourner, the art has been a way to express through
painting and drawing. She hopes it will keep her from
having to come back to Sojourner again. Her first stay,
when she was 13, lasted 18 weeks, she said.
“I sort of fell off the track and
my grades plummeted down,” she said. “I started to
re-use and I wrote a poem about one of my uses that a
friend found and got frightened. She told the school and
the school sent me here.”
The poem talked about the pills
she had been using and ended with, “That’s the only
thing I want to feel/It is the only good wonderful
happiest feeling I have.”
But now she has another happiness
in art.
“It’s a way I can express how I
feel because I have a problem with talking,” she said.
“It’s a way to express myself in a better way.”
Sojourner, a Butler County agency
that provides chemical dependency treatment for families
and individuals, operates six different programs in the
area.
The Sojourner Residential
Treatment home can house up to 16 adolescents. Many of
them are sent their through the juvenile court system,
but they also get referrals from area schools and Butler
County Children Services.
Their holistic approach treats the
whole person and the whole family through each stage of
the recovery process.
Betty Huff, director of the
residential treatment program and known to the dozen
teenagers now staying there as “Grandma Betty,” said
that her clients aren’t the bad kids people sometimes
think they are.
“They’re just good kids who have
made bad choices,” she said. “One of the reasons for
doing the art show is to open up the world to them. Even
though the Fitton Center is right here in Hamilton, they
don’t experience that part of the world.”
Huff said she’s always on the
lookout for volunteers who can come and share their
hobbies or interests with her clients. In addition to
art classes, they’ve learned landscaping and gardening,
Spanish, dancing and other hobbies.
“We can help them get clean and
sober. But if we don’t give them alternatives to
drinking and drugs, then we’re not doing our job,” Huff
said. “Otherwise, when they get out of here, they go
back to the same neighborhood and do the same things. We
hope that they can learn to express themselves in a new
way, and making art is new to a lot of the kids.
“They need to see that you can
have fun not using drugs because a lot of them don’t
believe that.”
Contact this reporter at (513)
820-2188 or
rjones@coxohio.com.

United Way Day of Caring
On Friday April 28th Sojourner participated in the
United Way Day of Caring. Sojourner Home located at 449
3rd Street hosted 6 volunteers from US Bank. The
volunteers worked along with clients in the program all
afternoon to clean, remove weeds, plant flowers, plant
bushes and even some strawberries. The end result was a
much improved look for the house.




Annual Report
Available
Sojourner's first Annual
Report is now available. The report details outcomes
and other important information covering the fiscal year
04-05 (July 1st, 2004 through June 30th, 2005). To
receive a hard copy, please contact Brent Russell
at
brussell@sojournerrecovery.org
or 513-896-3881.
Sojourner Receives Exemplary
Prevention Program Award
The Ohio Department of Alcohol and
Drug Addiction Services (ODADAS) honored exemplary
alcohol and other drug prevention programs at the Annual
Ohio Prevention and Education Conference (OPEC).
Sojourner's Perinatal Program received this award at a
ceremony in December. The Exemplary Prevention Program
winners are among Ohio's best in demonstrating a wide
variety of effective violence, alcohol, tobacco and
other drug prevention programs in diverse communities.
20th Anniversary
Open House
September 7th, 2005
Sojourner Gets $131K Grant to Help Teens
By Linda Ebbing - Journal
News
HAMILTON— Sojourner Recovery Services hopes to use more
than $130,000 in grant money to help adolescents with
substance-abuse disorders.
Sojourner, a Butler County agency that provides
long-term support to families and individuals affected
by chemical dependency, received $131,500 from the
Health Foundation of Greater Cincinnati.
“The big push now is to implement evidence-based
practices ... (curricula) that have been implemented and
tested and show viable results of success,” said Lu
Carson, associate executive director of Sojourner
Recovery Services.
The foundation recently gave out almost half a million
dollars in grant money to help organizations incorporate
evidence-based practices into their programs.
Sojourner Recovery Services provides comprehensive care
to families and individuals affected by chemical
dependency — regardless of ability to pay.
Sojourner has been implementing these evidence-based
practices in all of its programs, Carson said, including
a program called Seven Challenges developed by clinical
psychologist Dr. Robert Schwebel.
Adolescents need treatment intervention that differs
vastly from adults’ treatment, Carson said.
“The seven challenges in Schwebel’s program are
adolescent-friendly,” Carson said. “And so teens tend to
do very well utilizing that model. We still use 12-step
in our adult program and expose our teens to the 12-step
program.”
The seven challenges is a treatment philosophy that is
“empowering,” she said.
“The teen becomes a part of the treatment ... they are
not just told what to do,” Carson said.
The grant has allowed Sojourner Recovery Services the
opportunity to work with Schwebel directly, Carson said.
“We are just so grateful to the Health Foundation for
their support and guidance,” she said. “What’s
particularly exciting for us is that the grant allows us
to be trained by Dr. Schwebel as well as his coming
routinely to evaluate the program.”
For more information about Sojourner Recovery Services,
call 868-7654.
The rate of alcohol and other drug use among adolescents
age 12 to 17 in the Greater Cincinnati area has hovered
at 15 to 20 percent for the past six years, according to
information from the Health Foundation of Greater
Cincinnati. Yet, less than 10 percent of youth who are
using alcohol or other drugs receive treatment in any
given year, according to the needs assessments completed
by local alcohol and other drug service funding
organizations in 1999-2001. These needs assessments were
funded by the Health Foundation.
“The substance use disorder treatment field is far ahead
of where it was 10 years ago in understanding what
really works in helping youth,” said Donald Hoffman,
president and CEO of the Health Foundation. “But, we
have used adult models for treatment of adolescents for
too long. The Health Foundation is proud to be helping
agencies prepare for and implement these new practices.”
The Health Foundation of Greater Cincinnati is an
independent foundation dedicated to improving community
health and access to health care for vulnerable
populations. The foundation awards grants to non-profit
and governmental organizations for selected health
programs and activities in Cincinnati and 20 surrounding
counties in Ohio, Kentucky and Indiana.