Funding opportunities and shifts in public perception pay off in Southwest Oregon, making SUD treatment and recovery more possible than ever.

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On a cool cloudy day in March 2024, Casey Lowery sprinted nearly four miles to get to Bay Area First Step—a recovery and treatment center in Coos Bay, a small coastal community in Southwest Oregon. He showed up dripping with sweat, panting, desperate.

He knocked, and two men opened the door.

“I’m here to get treatment!” Casey blurted.

Thanks to a heads-up referral call, the two men were expecting Casey. But they didn’t expect him to run all the way there.

The men reacted with ease. They welcomed Casey and asked him questions as part of the intake process. They offered him a bed in one of their recovery housing locations, which would be ready for him in a week.

It wasn’t the first time Casey had tried to get help, but it was the first time he was accepted into a treatment program that would get him off the streets.

“I was ready to get serious, and I think Bay Area could see that,” Casey said. “It was the first time I’d felt real hope.”

At 38, Casey had struggled for years with addiction to pain medication, alcohol and heroin, fentanyl, meth. He turned to crime for basic needs and a way to feed his addictions, landing in jail four times over the course of about three years, primarily for theft.

“When you’re out there on the streets, there’s nothing that you won’t do,” Casey said.

His wife was also struggling with addiction, their marriage was unraveling, and after a judge ordered their then-2-year-old son be placed in foster care in 2022, Casey spiraled. He was a skilled welder but couldn’t hold a job. He couldn’t stay clean, lived on sidewalks and in cars, and he was losing his family.

During one stretch in jail, Casey suffered forced, unmanaged detox so agonizing he wanted it all to end. He tried to take his own life.

To anyone who may have similar thoughts, Casey urges them to think about all the people they would leave behind who love them.

“There are even complete strangers who love you, and there is a light at the end of the tunnel,” Casey said. “Hope is out there… you just have to find it.”

Coming full circle

The organization that took Casey in—Bay Area First Step (BAFS)—is one of the oldest organizations in Southwest Oregon for peer-run recovery support services, including recovery housing, opening its doors in 1995. Executive Director Steve Sanden remembers the early days. He, too, showed up on their doorstep seeking help. That was 23 years ago.

“I needed housing, I needed recovery support… I needed a stable environment to get my life together,” Sanden said.

But he lived in Curry County, where no such services existed back then. He heard about BAFS from a worker at a local Department of Human Services (DHS) office, which meant he had to travel.

“So I hopped on one of the inter county busses and brought what I had, which was a duffel bag and a broken bicycle, up here to Coos County,” Sanden recalls.

BAFS was bare bones, with only two employees and two run-down apartments housing 12 people total. Sanden took a bed in the living room of the men’s apartment.

And he never left.

After graduating the then-standard 90-day treatment program, Sanden started working part time for BAFS. They found his accounting and computer skills useful. Before too long, Sanden took on more and more responsibility, eventually becoming executive director in 2004, overseeing a staff of eight.

“I never expected to end up in recovery work,” Sanden said. “I had business and tech skills, and a long history of addiction. Nothing pointed to this path. But helping others the way I was helped has given me something I never had before—a real sense of purpose. It’s the most meaningful work I’ve ever done.”

Compared to those early days, BAFS now takes a much more person-centered approach to helping people struggling with substance use disorder (SUD), rather than the old one-size-fits-all 90-day-program approach that worked for Sanden but certainly not for everyone. The programs are tailored for each person’s needs and situations, using a 100% peer-support model. That means the entire staff, be they accountants, counselors, mentors or maintenance crew, everyone, is a peer—someone who understands the struggles of each person who shows up on their doorstep because they’ve lived it themselves, and they’ve survived and thrived.

“…helping others the way I was helped has given me something I never had before—a real sense of purpose. It’s the most meaningful work I’ve ever done.”

— Steve Sanden, BAFS Executive Director

Growth… in Coos County and beyond

Over the years, Bay Area First Step’s growth was mostly slow and incremental. But 10 years ago, in 2015, the tide changed when Oregon Health Authority (OHA) awarded BAFS a $225,000 “facilitating center” grant to develop curriculum, provide more recovery support services, hire more people, build a recovery community center, and to support other peer-run organizations. It established BAFS as a “model program and center for excellence,” setting the stage for future expansion. BAFS has received that grant every year since.

“That first OHA grant was a major milestone,” Sanden said. “It really raised our profile all across Oregon, which gave us access to more funding opportunities, which in turn allowed us to purchase vehicles, grow our staff, and to keep sharing our expertise with others.”

Then, in 2020, Oregon voters passed Measure 110 (Drug Addiction Treatment and Recovery Act), and BAFS wasted no time in applying for grants. Between state and federal funding opportunities, their growth sped up in a way that addressed some of the community’s most critical needs.

BAFS has put to good use about $4.2 million in grant funding from Measure 110. That money has allowed them to nearly double its staff, from 21 to 41, as well as purchase and renovate several new buildings, or renovate buildings they already owned.

“For years we’d been leasing a 5,000-square foot building on Sheridan Ave. in North Bend for recovery housing, but we were in danger of losing the lease,” Sanden explained. “Measure 110 funding allowed us to purchase the building in 2023, renovate it, and we have 24 beds there serving the community.”

Many of those beds on Sheridan Ave. are used in coordination with Coos County Community Corrections for people on probation or parolees who need SUD support. Over the past 18 years it’s estimated that the facility has helped thousands of people in their recovery journey at an especially uncertain time in their lives.

That includes Casey Lowery, who’d been released from jail about three weeks before showing up on Bay Area’s doorstep.

“I was sober that day,” Casey said. “But it was only a matter of time before I wasn’t, and that Sheridan place saved my life. It was a privilege to be able to do my chores, cleaning the kitchen and the floors. I was just excited to have that opportunity.”

In total, BAFS operates six recovery housing facilities in Coos County that house up to 126 people at any given time. They are all NARR-accredited, which means they meet the high standards of the National Alliance of Recovery Residences (NARR).

Another Measure 110-funded addition was BAFS’s purchase and renovation of Oceanview—a 16-bed NARR-accredited recovery housing facility in Coos Bay.

But perhaps the most meaningful BAFS expansion is something Sanden has wanted to do for years—serve his neighbors to the south, in Curry County.

“Making progress in Curry County is one of my biggest points of pride,” Sanden said. “They’ve had nothing. They had nothing when I lived there 23 years ago, no place for me to go, virtually no resources whatsoever.”

In early 2025, BAFS purchased a 9,000-square foot building in the town of Harbor (near Brookings) to create a recovery community center—the first of its kind in Curry County, where overdose rates are among the highest in the state, especially for opioids.

The community center will offer a welcoming and comfortable place where people can drop in and get connected to recovery, treatment and housing services (through BAFS or not), participate in support groups, art and cooking classes, or to simply gather and socialize. The center will also offer workshops to help build life skills, prepare resumes, get drivers licenses reinstated, and fun group outings such as hiking and bowling.

It was all made possible with $2.36 million awarded to BAFS from Oregon’s portion ($600 million) of the National Opioid Settlement.

The recovery community center in Harbor is not open yet, but staff is being hired and trained. And Sanden doesn’t want BAFS’s presence in Curry County to end there.

“One day, we hope to also provide NARR-accredited recovery housing in Curry County,” Sanden said.

Public perception

Outside of funding and budget opportunities that support the expansion of SUD treatment and recovery services, there’s something else that represents a huge and positive shift—something that can’t really be measured.

Attitude.

“When I went through recovery, it was looked at totally differently back then,” Sanden said. “It wasn’t considered a disease or a health crisis. It was considered more of a moral crisis.”

It was difficult to convince the local government to allow such services to even exist, particularly in neighborhoods where residents simply didn’t want them there.

Sanden recalls one city Planning Commission meeting in 2018 where BAFS proposed leasing and renovating a horribly run-down 40-room motel in the Empire area of Coos Bay. The plan was to create an apartment building with a recovery community center—a less structured recovery environment where people live a sober life, with a House Manager, rules and peer accountability, but without the intensity of serving people who are still drinking or using drugs, or those with higher levels of mental health needs. This kind of environment is often called “sober living” or “sober housing.”

About 100 community members showed up at City Hall to protest the plan.

“They were worried for good reason,” Sanden said. “They’d experienced untreated alcoholism and drug addiction in their communities. They’d seen needles on the ground. Occasionally their stuff was stolen or whatever, you know?”

Almost immediately, the Coos Bay Planning Commission rejected the proposal.

But Sanden didn’t give up. They appealed the decision and got a land use attorney from Portland to make the 4-hour drive and further explain and convince the City to allow the project to go forward.

It worked.

“The City Council reluctantly allowed us to carry out our plan, and we did a good job of it, turning the whole place around,” Sanden said. “And now I see on Facebook, for example, people commenting on how nice the place is, saying things like, ‘Hey, what happened here? It looks great!’”

Since then, Bay Area First Step has opened other facilities, with virtually no community or government opposition.

“More and more, our state and local governments recognize these types of services as a funding priority, rather than the last thing they want to put money into,” Sanden said. “A lot more people understand addiction nowadays, that people recover, that it’s not always a life sentence, and that progress can be made.”

Casey Lowery has seen community attitudes change, too.

“Not too long ago, people would try running you out of town,” he said, “and that’s happening less and less now. Because that’s someone’s son or daughter or mother that’s out there. It could be a 60-year-old grandma, or it could be a 30-year-old son or a teenager that fell into addiction simply because… well, it just happens, a series of unfortunate events. That’s why these programs are necessary, because alcohol and drugs do not discriminate. It never has, and neither do these programs. These organizations… Bay Area and the others… they rescue people, and they save lives.”

The journey continues

Casey’s recovery journey took many twists and turns, beyond Sheridan Ave. and BAFS, incorporating housing and other services within a network of area organizations including Coos Health & Wellness, Adapt, Oxford House, etc. The groups communicate often, enabling one person to tap into multiple resources to meet all their recovery needs, if necessary, including mental health therapy, outpatient treatment, skills training, and parenting classes.

The goal is—no cracks to fall through.

Probably the most valuable aspect of Casey’s journey is the peer model.

“It was a game changer for me,” Casey said. “They just know. Other people that have been through what I’ve been through, and now helping me… it’s like they’re passing the torch.”

Casey’s wife, Crystal, was on her own recovery journey with BAFS as well. They both needed to do a lot of work to get their son back and rebuild their family and futures.

They succeeded—each graduating their respective treatment programs and, at last, regaining custody of their son. By May 2025, they were all living together under one roof for the first time in more than 2-1/2 years.

“The three of us… we’re a blessing that goes around in a circle,” Casey said. “My wife is my support system, and I’m hers, and we learn from our son every day.”

From the window of their second-floor apartment, Casey can see one of BAFS’s recovery housing facilities just on the other side of his back fence, reminding him every day how far he’s come.

“It’s been an amazing ride, a miracle story,” Casey said.

Working harder than he’s ever worked before, Casey earned certificates of achievement in parenting, peer support, and has become a certified recovery mentor himself. He works part-time as a commercial painter and is taking classes at Southwestern Oregon Community College to earn his GED.

Physically, Casey works out frequently, eats healthy and has gained 60 pounds of muscle since entering recovery, taking advantage of all the exercise classes and workout opportunities BAFS either offers or supports at a community gym.

The ultimate goal for Casey and Crystal is to become drug and alcohol counselors, which he describes as his “calling.”

“I want to pass the torch,” Casey said. “My motto is to always leave the campground in better shape than you found it, and that’s how I want to go through life, making things better.”