The county aims to spend roughly $800,000 dollars over five years on the Recovery Unplugged program and the Face the Music Foundation that supports it.
Founded around ten years ago, the program operates in five states, not including a new location that will soon be opening in South Carolina. Over the past ten years, the program has served over 14,000 clients.
Clients from New Hanover County are apparently being sent to the program's Fort Lauderdale location, based on
a conversation during the March 12 meeting of City of Wilmington and New Hanover County officials to discuss opioid settlement spending. They're being sent out of the county (and the state), because there aren't comparable services here locally, according to county officials.
The program has 13 levels of care and methods they use, including Medication Assisted Therapy (MAT) and faith-based programs, to work with clients. They are staffed with medical professionals that do assessments and create care plans for clients. However, there’s one thing that Greg Roselle, the director of digital marketing, says sets them apart from many other programs: its use of music.
“And so him being in recovery himself, our co founder, his wheels kind of started spinning and was like, well, is is this a therapeutic tool? … And lo and behold, there was, and what we do is we don't do traditional music therapy, but rather we incorporate music into everything that we do here.”
Each recovery program occurs in steps – with the highest levels of care and supervision coming first, weaning down to more and more independence for clients, Roselle says.
“So each one is a very deliberate and calculated step down where you know, these patients slowly get more of their autonomy and daily responsibilities back. That way, when they do go back to their living situation, they will have had enough practice doing some of that stuff already.”
The funding for the upcoming fiscal year will allow New Hanover County to send 15 clients for a 30-day detox and residential treatment which costs $10,000 per client, or 5 clients for a 3-6 month detox and residential treatment program which costs $30,000 per client.
