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“If you started, we can connect you with services. “No matter where you are in your recovery, you'll have somewhere to go.”
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“It's gonna be a safe space for the entire behavioral community,” Alim said. At this center, Alim said, anyone will be able to find a community representing their lived experiences and participate in group mental health sessions with empathetic listeners. In addition to the new sober houses, People, Places, and Dreams also plans to open a peer center this summer on Prospect Ave., just down the street from its headquarters. “So you have to find a whole new set of people, you know? Everyone that you were dealing with beforehand is all into drugs and prostitution.” “A part of the whole sex work is, when you're involved in that, it's its own set of people,” Williams said. Williams, like many people with substance use disorders, had to find a new community when she sought to get clean. Offering clients a new community is the core function of People, Places, and Dreams. Through the program, Williams hopes to create a comfortable space in which to discuss trans culture and create a peer support network composed of trans women. Given her particular life experience, Williams is spearheading People, Places, and Dreams’ programming for trans people, starting with group sessions and other community-building programs at the new sober house. It’s about “learning from people who have walked down that road,” Williams said. Additionally, it’s run by peer supporters, meaning that all of its service providers – like Alim – have experiences in common with the people in their care. People, Places, and Dreams is a minority women-led organization. That’s why it’s important to consider the representation of different races in an organization’s leadership: it’s generally a good way to gauge the group’s ability to care for marginalized communities, Harris said. Many of those challenges stem from the discrimination LGBTQ+ people of color face both for their sexuality and the color of their skin, Harris said.įor some queer people of color struggling with substance use disorders, she said the thought of stepping into a recovery space operated by people who don’t look like them or understand their culture dissuades them from seeking treatment. Those on the agency’s staff that aren’t themselves LGBTQ+ people of color have been trained to understand the needs and challenges faced by them. The LGBT Community Center refers clients to People, Places, and Dreams, Harris said, because queer people of color are a priority there. “We certainly, as people of color and queer people of color, are sometimes not the first thought in terms of service delivery,” Harris said. While local mental health providers and recovery programs offer services that can work for LGBTQ+ people of color and other marginalized populations, many don’t prioritize programming that caters to the needs of those groups, said Phyllis Harris, executive director of the LGBT Community Center of Greater Cleveland. Outside of People, Places, and Dreams’ LGBTQ+ sober houses, only one other exists in the state, and it too, is in the greater Cleveland area. Those sober houses will add to the two outpatient sober houses for men and women the agency already operates, which Alim said are occupied mostly by LGBTQ+ people. The new house, along with another LGBTQ+ sober house that’s set to open later this year, is part of a larger $6 million project aimed at expanding the agency’s services for the LGBTQ+ community. Currently based on Prospect Avenue in MidTown, the agency is opening a new outpatient sober house specifically for trans people this month in Cleveland Heights. Now, those experiences inform her work as the executive director of People, Places, and Dreams, a Cleveland-based wellness agency Alim founded in 2019.Īlim founded the agency to provide mental health and addiction recovery services to people of color, women, trans people, and others in the LGBTQ+ community. Her mother had schizoaffective disorder and often left home for months on end, and her father struggled with a substance use disorder, while she raised five children on her own. “I’ve been through every system you can imagine,” Alim said. Nafisah Alim has worked in the social services field for 20 years, but for the 20 years of her life before that, she was “on the other side of the table,” she said.