Our Journey
Our Beginning
Austin Recovery Network, in some way shape or form, has served the Austin community since it was founded in 1967 as Austin Recovery. In the 50+ years of it’s existence, Austin Recovery Network has served families through its residential and outpatient programs and has established itself as one of Austin’s quintessential community service programs.
Over the last year, the organization has gone through some big changes. In February 2020, the Boards of Austin Recovery, University High School and Keystone APG signed the paperwork to merge the three organization into one, unified recovery continuum, and the Austin Recovery Network was born.
Within one month, in March 2020, the COVID Pandemic hit and much of ARN’s in person programming was shut down. Newspaper coverage communicated the organization’s demise and large numbers of staff were let go in order to prepare for our shuttering.
Then, in July 2020, the Austin community circled wagons around ARN and came forward with the encouragement and funding (including the generous Family House grant from St. David’s) to keep our operations going. With funding for the residential Family House, the largest of ARN’s five programs, we were able to lean in to serving the most vulnerable of our beneficiaries: women recovering from substance use disorder and their infant children. Where the Family House program had only been a part of the residential programming offered at our Hicks Family Ranch facility, it now became our sole residential focus.
ARN Reimagined
The newly ARN worked quickly to restructure and beef up our capability to serve this demographic through in-person, residential programming. At the same time, the staff pivoted and quickly reimagined our services throughout our additional programming: online recovery support at the High School, Alternative Peer Group and even our adult services, including Outpatient and Alumni Services. Our staff and programming has proven itself to be agile, effective and essential to the communities we serve and we are working to expand programming as we near the end of the pandemic.
As the Pandemic nears an end, we have resurfaced with new strength. With space for up to 50-60 women and their 50 infants in our Family House program, Outpatient treatment, Alumni support, adolescent peer support and a recovery high school, Austin Recovery Network is re-emerging. We offer both online and in person services and make our services financially accessible to all through State funding and generous support from our community. Reach out if you want to learn more!