EVERGREEN, Colo. — Surrounded by trees and the peace of Mother Nature is Spero Recovery Center, a nonprofit drug and alcohol rehab facility helping men on their journey to recovery.
"70% of our clients are from Denver and from Colorado and so when I say that we do nationwide, we do have kind of a niche way of doing our treatment model, and so we do get a lot of interest from outside the state," said Dave Johnson, CEO for Spero Recovery Center.
Since the center opened five years ago, staff has seen a need not only in Colorado but across the country to provide addiction treatment services.
"Really, the demand is an epidemic, as we all know in this country. You can't open a newspaper or watch the news without seeing the impacts, especially the opioid epidemic," said Marty Ferrero, executive director for Spero Recovery Center.
As a nonprofit drug and rehab center, people are able to receive the support they need at an affordable price. Bret Rausch is an alumnus of the program and now helps teach a music course to encourage the men to open up about their recovery journey.
"I've gotten a lot of good feedback of it's been very helpful in expressing themselves and feeling things that have been buried deep within for a long time, right, or things that they've been numbing out," said Rausch. "They're able to talk about it now and just through music is the biggest thing."
Not only does the center help support clients on their recovery journey but there is also a focus on mental health.
"The vast majority of our clients do have some sort of co-occurring condition related to mental health, whether it's anxiety, depression, bipolar disorder. Some might have been previously diagnosed, but part of the art and science of this work is teasing out from our clinical team how much is this substance induced versus how much of it is organic," said Ferrero.
As the center continues to serve and guide people on their recovery journey, the leadership team recognizes the growing need to help more individuals in the community. A ribbon-cutting ceremony will be held on Friday for Spero's new outpatient program, located at 30923 Evergreen Parkway.
"Most recently, the last two or three years, we've seen a tremendous increase in the amount of calls to where we've had to open an outpatient here in Evergreen, which we opened about a month ago and our grand opening is Friday," said Johnson.
Nancy Judge, president of the Evergreen Area Chamber of Commerce, shared her excitement seeing this nonprofit prosper in their mountain community and how the center's expansion will help support more people.
"They've been providing a great service to people from within and without our community who come for addiction recovery services. And now to see them expanding into more general mental health services is going to meet an even greater need that is prevalent in our society," said Judge.
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