Allan Appel Photo
James at refurbished Retreat.
If you’re a doctor, a certified nursing aide, a nurse, culinary worker, maintenance person, or driver, Jackie James wants to see you on Sept. 10.
James is helping organize a job fair, between 1 and 6 p.m. for the Retreat, a short-term residential addiction services and recovery center that plans to hire 150 people to staff its new 118-bed facility at 915 Ella Grasso Blvd.
If you’re a New Haven resident, you receive preference, according to James.
James, who established her Gem Consulting firm after leaving political offices (Hill alder, Democratic town chair), has been working with the for-profit Florida-based Retreat Behavior Health. She helped the firm find the former and long vacant nursing home on the Boulevard, facing the lush marshes of the West River, to set up a New Haven outpost for the business.
James said her own grandfather had been a patient at the former nursing home many years ago. When she visited about five years ago with Retreat’s staff to check out the property as a possible site, the empty building was sprouting mould and some rooms had puddles on the floor.
No longer.
Retreat exec John Brown estimated the company spent $10 million on a gut rehab of the building. It now sports a professional shining kitchen and dining room, 118 individual rooms, music, art, yoga, and massage therapy suites, a garden, and a gymnasium (on the way), and waiting to receive clients from the Greater New Haven area or from anywhere in the country.
James said that the private in-patient substance abuse treatment center is in a located near where a need is great but not in the middle of a residential area.
“We’re within the city but also on the outskirts. There’s privacy for the patients, and also it’s not smack dab in the middle of a neighborhood,” she said.
The company received its certificate of occupancy recently.
People from Connecticut are going there for treatment, she said, which is one of the reasons a new facility in New Haven made sense.
The new kitchen.
James said people are excited not only about the prospect of those who need help being able to get it while remaining near to their families, but, also about the possibility of new jobs.
While New Haven has other drug treatment facilities in town, many, such as the APT Foundation, are clinics for walk-in services. Residential facilities, such as Turnbridge, are relatively small.
The Retreat, with its 118 beds, is more a campus. James said the group is already making partnerships with local nonprofits.
Those already include a partnership with Yale-New Haven Hospital to receive clients who need a hospital setting, as well as APT Foundation and the Cornell Scott Health Center, from which, James said, the Retreat expects to receive referrals.
The Retreat is not for young teens, but for people from 18 to 100, said James. Involving family in the recovery is one of the key aspects of the approach, she said. “The family is as much part of the treatment. A lot is education. They have to be educated about what are the triggers. Sometimes it’s the family itself.”
Culinary students from Gateway Community College and from the culinary program at ConnCAT are expected to be among those applying for jobs on Sept. 10. James said she has also reached out to Southern, Eli Whitney Vocational High School to send its alums and students to the job fair.
“We expect a crowd,” she said.
John Brown said Retreat aims to “treat the whole person” along with a sense of community and compassion.
A 24-hour facility, the Retreat has 10 staffers on a shift while other outfits might have only three or four, he claimed. “We overstaff because we want to make sure patients and staff are always comfortable.”
The Retreat is willing to hire people as staff who have themselves gone through the recovery process, Brown said. At all levels. Founder and CEO Peter Schorr went through the process before he established the company in 2011.
The company’s original site is in Palm Springs, Florida, with another facility in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. The site in New Haven will be the first in the heart of a true urban area where the need for treatment for substance abuse, trauma, PTSD, and other mental health conditions is great, and, alas, growing.
The facility will have three vehicles (with drivers) to pick up patients from as far as six or seven hours away, the company said. James said the expectation is to have patients largely from the Greater New Haven area, although at the Retreat’s two other facilities, the patients are from around the country.
The average stay is 30 days, depending on the insurance. The Retreat is a for-profit operation relying on its income from insurance payments. James said about 10 percent of the beds at the center will be set aside for people without insurance as well.
The Retreat will be training all its staffers, and when the organization is staffed up, patients will begin arriving.
She said the expectation is that the Retreat will be up and running by Christmas.
Hi Ms.Jackie James,
My name is Aliah Jones and I would love to become apart of your team at Rehab Center Plan. I'd like to use my communication skills, customer service skills, culinary training, and health skills that I learned at Eli Whitney Technical High School and New Haven Job Corp's along with what you'd be teaching and give back to my community.