By 2025, it was clear that certification alone would not close the larger gaps in the system.

Montana has services. What it does not yet have is a continuum of care people can reliably move through from crisis to stability. Detox exists. Treatment exists. Recovery housing, peer support, community centers, reentry programs, and workforce initiatives all exist. But these services are too few and too disconnected.

The cost of these gaps is evident. Someone completes treatment without stable housing and relapses within days. A peer support relationship built over months ends when funding runs out. Without employment or a reentry plan, housing becomes a stopgap, not an anchor point.

These are not edge cases. They are the norm.

Early recovery is fragile. We cannot make people recover. However, we can build systems that expand support and connect it more effectively at every stage of recovery.

We began that work in 2025.

What We Built in 2025

We certified 9 additional homes, bringing the statewide total to 65 and extending quality recovery housing to Great Falls, Kalispell, and Havre for the first time.

We introduced the Recovery Navigator, Montana's first live online directory for locating housing, treatment, and recovery support services statewide.

We brought together more than 120 leaders from across the state to begin shaping a statewide Recovery-Oriented System of Care.

We began developing a Standardized Resident Dataset to create a consistent benchmark for tracking demographics, recovery capital, and outcomes across recovery homes.

We delivered hundreds of hours of technical assistance to providers across compliance, business development, clinical integration, data systems, reentry planning, and tribal program design.

Our Priorities Now

It also means improving reentry coordination with the Department of Corrections, closing service gaps in rural and tribal communities, and building clearer pathways from recovery into employment.

This is systems-building work. It is not designed for headlines. It is designed to last. Once in place, it can hold through staff turnover, budget cycles, and leadership changes, creating a stronger foundation for early recovery.

What Comes Next

Over the past year, I’ve had versions of the same conversation with partners across this state — sometimes in conference rooms, sometimes on the phone at the end of a long day.

It always comes back to the same truth: long-term recovery happens in community, not in treatment centers. The antidote to addiction is connection, consistency, and peer-led support. The most powerful force in this work is a person with lived experience walking alongside someone still finding their way.

We all know this. We apply it every day to the people we serve.

But too often, our organizations operate differently. We compete for limited resources, protect our lanes, and work in parallel rather than together. The result is a system that never quite connects.

Recovery is built through connection and continuity. The systems we build to support it have to operate the same way.

That means using shared tools like the Recovery Navigator as a common referral pathway. It means contributing to and learning from shared data so we can understand what is working. It means coordinating across providers so that people are not starting over at every transition point.

You cannot fund your way into that. It is an organizational ethic — a decision about how you show up.

We have built the beginnings of the infrastructure for a connected recovery system in Montana. What happens next depends on whether we choose to use it together.

When more organizations make that shift, we move from a loose network of programs to a system people can actually rely on — one that people can move through without falling through the gaps, even in the most fragile stages of recovery.