Hope Happens Here: Addiction Treatment Services At 50 Years

An organization that has touched thousands of lives – and saved many of them – hits a major milestone this year.

Traverse City-based Addiction Treatment Services is celebrating 50 years in 2025. While this organization is not the only one to provide treatment for substance use disorders in the Grand Traverse region, it’s the largest and most specialized group to do so.

Though most people are at least vaguely aware of its treatment home and original facility on Eighth Street (Dakoske Hall), ATS has a much larger footprint, with 76 employees working across 11 properties in the area. It also has a mobile unit that brings care to a variety of rural communities in the outlying area.

The organization provides a full continuum of treatment services ranging from withdrawal management to residential treatment and recovery homes. It also has a variety of outpatient, community outreach and peer support programs. Some clients interact with ATS only once, though others have relationships that last years.

While ATS accepts cash payments and traditional insurance, the bulk of its services are covered by Medicaid, a government health care program that provides services to low-income people (most people who receive ATS services fit this demographic).

CEO Paula Lipinski says alcohol use disorder makes up a full two thirds of the cases handled by ATS. Other major offenders include opioids (which surged in recent years but have tapered slightly, Lipinski says, as regulations have made them harder to obtain) and methamphetamines. Marijuana and a handful of other substances round out the list.

The organization serves about 1,500 clients a year and has served tens of thousands over its lifetime.

ATS staffers are the “heartbeat of the organization” and what truly sets the organization apart, Lipinski says.

“We have a lot of people that work for us who are either in recovery or they've been impacted by the disease, so they have a personal connection, and it comes through in everything that they do,” Lipinski says. “Our people genuinely care. They’re mission-driven and do this for the right reasons.”

What is now called ATS began in 1975 as the Northwestern Michigan Halfway House in what is now Dakoske Hall. The organization’s founding fathers bought the historic Wilhelm residence and created a place where men could begin to break the chains of addiction.

Around the same time, an unrelated effort by the Traverse City Women’s Club led to a similar facility and program, called Phoenix Hall, to treat women. This program moved to a few locations before settling at its current location on State Street.

In 1979, the board, programs and staff of the two entities merged to become what would eventually be known as Addiction Treatment Services.

Aside from helping thousands of clients over the decades, ATS has greatly eased the strain on many loved ones and institutions throughout the community.

“I can’t even fathom the amount of support we’ve provided over the past 50 years,” Lipinski says. “(Addiction) is such a deadly disease. It impacts families, it impacts communities, it impacts our healthcare systems.”

Lipinski says many throughout northern Michigan have special connections to current or former ATS staffers due to the assistance the organization has given them or someone they know.

“You see a lot of bad in this job. You see sadness and you see darkness because the disease is darkness,” she says.  “But you see so much good. (Our slogan is) ‘Hope Happens Here,’ and it’s legit.”

Addiction treatment has evolved considerably over the years, and ATS has evolved with it. The science has improved, and there are now far more tools in the toolbox.

“Recovery is now an integrated method. It's not just sitting down in a 12-step meeting and talking about why you need to have a higher power,” Lipinski says. “It's behavioral health, but there’s also the medical component that helps with craving and all of those things, because it's a physical disease as well.”

Perhaps the biggest positive change over the decades has been the reduced stigma surrounding addiction. Unfortunately, one of the biggest drivers of this reduction was and is the ongoing opioid epidemic, which is hitting all socioeconomic classes.

“It was a real turning point and a huge game changer, because people for a long time were not accepting that (addiction) is a disease. It was ‘Pull yourself up by your bootstraps, get over it and move on,’” Lipinski says. “But with the opioid epidemic, people saw that even a drug that was legitimately prescribed can cause substance use disorder, and they saw it impacting a lot more people, including friends and family members.”

The current environment presents challenges to the organization. ATS is in the process of temporarily closing six recovery homes in part due to “drastic shift” in Medicaid support (though this move is also driven by a plan to eventually consolidate into one campus).

“I think the writing on the wall is that Medicaid is going to greatly change in the next probably four or five months. We have to accept the things we don't have control over, and so if we don't have control, how do we react to it?” Lipinski says. “It’s really about looking at who we are and how we do things to ensure that we can be around forever.”

It's likely that ATS will more aggressively pursue other sources of funding in the future, including those from municipal sources (including marijuana tax dollars and opioid settlement funds allocated to the state and local municipalities) and various grants. They also recently hired a fundraising officer.

Inset photo: Lipinski and ATS Chief Operations Officer Mark Patrick.

Editor's note: This is a condensed version of a more in-depth story that appears in the July edition of the Traverse City Buisness News (The Ticker's sister publication). Click here to subscribe and click here to see where to find it on newsstands.