Amy’s Place will help women with recovery struggles after quitting substance abuse.
The Guardian reports that the Amy Winehouse Foundation have opened Amy’s Place, a 16-person home for women in recovery for drugs and alcohol addiction. The facility has “12 self-contained apartments,” four of which will have two beds. The aim of the home is to help women who have quit drugs or alcohol learn how to re-ingratiate themselves into regular life and to have a support system in place to avoid relapsing.
Dominic Ruffy, the special project director at the Amy Winehouse Foundation who has, himself, been in recovery tells The Guardian: “There are about six women-only rehabs, and beyond that, there’s an even greater paucity of women-specific recovery housing beds… There is only one other women-only recovery house in London and it’s only a four-bed with a six-month waiting list… Our experience shows if you give people an extended period of time post-traditional rehabilitation treatment, you will improve the percentage of people who stay clean [in the] long term. We have a saying in recovery that the drink and drugs aren’t our problem, it’s living life clean and sober.”
Amy’s Place will use what is called a “co-production model,” which gives its residents shared control over their recovery. To develop the program, women who stayed at London’s Hope House were consulted about what a perfect facility would look like. For Amy’s Place, that includes things like yoga and employability workshops.
Winehouse died five years ago this past July from an accidental alcohol poisoning. The Amy Winehouse Foundation was set up to help women with similar substance abuse issues.