Partners Corner
It takes a village…
The Recovery Support and Reentry Opportunity Center (RSROC) will serve as a one-stop-shop for people being released from jail or prison into Boone County. We will operate as a hybrid of a recovery community center and a resource center. Missouri presently has four recovery community centers. These centers provide a safe place for people in recovery to hang out and to get connected relationally to others in recovery. The RSROC will be similarly modeled. We will have couches and coffee, a basketball hoop and video games. This will be a safe place where people recently released from jail or prison can come hang out and get connected to others who are facing, or who faced and overcame, the challenges of successfully reentering our community. People will not need an appointment or a reason to stop by. We will be inviting everyone who is justice-involved to simply come, grab a cup of coffee, and hang out for a bit.
What will make the RSROC special, however – aside from providing a safe place to connect with healthy people who are doing the right thing – is they can also get connected to the supports and resources needed to address their criminogenic needs. When fully operational, we expect to have three private offices and three walk-up desks which local nonprofits and governmental agencies will rotate through. At any given time, six different service providers will be present at the center. But who you see there on Monday morning might look very different than who will be there on Thursday afternoon. A small 6-person implementation team is meeting weekly to plan our start-up, and we meet as a larger group monthly. Our partner list includes dozens of representatives from decision makers at the Department of Corrections and the Department of Mental Health, in addition to both larger and smaller agencies here in Columbia.
While in2Action is taking the lead in launching the RSROC, we know that to be maximally effective this must be owned and operated by the community at large. It is our expectation that a couple years from now the Reentry Opportunity Center will become its own nonprofit, and in2Action will continue to provide recovery support services (see Directors Comments), which is what we do best.
The Grand Opening of the Recovery Support and Reentry Opportunity Center (RSROC) will be on October 17th at 2103 Burlington. The event will start at 9:30am and we will begin serving free food at 10:30 am. This event is open to everyone in the community and we especially want to invite people who have been incarcerated in the past, as well as people who are currently helping those returning to our community from jail or prison. Please mark your calendars and plan to join us.
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