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Recover Sobriety a Long Way from Home

With help from the Hanley Family Foundation, a unique program for Hispanics struggling with addiction is flourishing in Florida. Casa de Recuperacion para Alcoholicos (CARPA) is a long-term "sober house" for Spanish-speaking, recovering-alcoholic immigrants.

CARPA had its beginnings in 1992, when Father Jim Bogert, a priest who once studied in Guatemala, met with local Guatemalans, many of whom were single males working for landscaping services or citrus packing plants. Bogert discovered these young men often relied on alcohol to cope with living in a foreign environment offering little stimulation.

Bogert established an Alcoholics Anonymous program for Spanish-speaking immigrants. Participants in the AA program struggled to stay sober, though, because many shared homes with active alcoholics. Father Bogert encouraged participants to share homes together.

Bogert later accepted a position as chaplain at the Hanley Center in West Palm Beach. But he kept in touch with a group of his Hispanic participants, one of whom was Micky Fernandez, now executive director of CARPA. Inspired by their own recovery, Fernandez and his cohorts rented some dilapidated houses, renovated them, and began to run them as Spanish-only "sober houses" for recovering alcoholic males. What Fernandez’s group failed to realize, however, was that they needed zoning permits for such facilities. The city eventually closed down the sober houses.

Undaunted, the group resolved to purchase their own facility. They collected money at each recovery meeting and built a bank account. In 2001, they bought a facility and officially opened Casa de Recuperacion para Alcoholicos. CARPA quickly became a "center of Hispanic sobriety," according to Bogert, and has served over 300 men since its opening. As CARPA’s reputation has spread, local courts have begun to refer alcohol-influenced offenders to the program.

Recently, a local community redevelopment organization seeking to gentrify the area where the current CARPA facility resides offered to help CARPA move to a new location in the West Palm Beach area. Moreover, the Diocese of Palm Beach has donated some property to CARPA, so CARPA is building an additional, larger facility in Belle Glade.

The Hanley Family Foundation has nurtured CARPA’s success almost from the beginning. The Hanley Center has contributed furniture and equipment to CARPA and provides a hot dinner to CARPA participants nightly. The Hanley Family Foundation matched a challenge grant to fund the original West Palm Beach facility, and now has offered to match any funds CARPA can raise for its new Belle Glade facility. So far, CARPA has collected about two-thirds of the funds it needs, Bogert estimates.

"The Hanley Foundation has inspired us to hope and to dream dreams," Father Bogert exults. "They’ve put our goals within our reach, enabling our dreams to become reality." Thanks to Hanley and a lot of hard work and persistence, hundreds of young men who were adrift in a foreign culture have found direction and purpose at CARPA.