{ This series is a collaboration between the Leviza Lazer and Addiction Recovery Care to report on men and women’s struggles as they went from active-addiction to abundant-recovery. With half of its 400+ employees in recovery from substance use disorder, Addiction Recovery Care (ARC), Inc. is leading the way in Appalachia when it comes to combining drug treatment and vocational training that results in second chance employment. Roughly one-third of ARC’s approximately 450 employees are graduates of an ARC treatment program. ARC believes that the solution to the nation’s workforce issues is lying dormant in the lives of those who are struggling with addiction or alcoholism. This is the story of ARC’s founder. }
The year was 2006. By all outward appearances, Tim Robinson was on track to achieve the career he’d always dreamed about. Growing up in Inez, practically in the Courthouse, watching and learning from his dad, the Martin County PVA, Tim had long cherished the idea of going into politics and being in public service.
As the Assistant County Attorney of Lawrence County and the partner of a successful law firm, he was just biding his time and looking for the right opportunity to run for office or take an appointment in Frankfort.
Inwardly, however, Tim was dying. It was a slow death, precipitated by a spiritual decay that had started in 1999 when his mom was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer.
“I had just achieved a big milestone on my way to a career by being able to come to the University of Kentucky Law School, and then I found out my mom had cancer,” explained Tim. The news took the wind out of him and he began to cope the way tens of millions of Americans cope when they have a problem: he drank copious amounts of alcohol.
Drinking profusely isn’t unusual for a law school student. Sadly, overconsumption of alcohol has a storied tradition in the legal profession. In many ways, Tim’s drinking didn’t stand out. Parties and binge drinking were common ways to de-stress from the pressures of legal studies. Tim, however, had a secret- one he didn’t even know about: he was predisposed to be an alcoholic.
According to scientific studies, 50-60% of what predisposes you to be an addict is genetic. Your body doesn’t process alcohol and drugs in the same way as most, and the punitive side of drinking- think, hangovers- don’t keep you in check the way they do for the vast majority of drinking Americans.
Tim found the alcohol numbed him and helped him cope with the pain of his mother’s illness and death. He continued to drink heavily the entire time he was in law school, and by the time he finished, four years and two professional degrees later, he was a raging alcoholic.
By 2006, now an otherwise successful attorney, Tim’s alcohol use had caught up with him. He was miserable. He just wanted to die. In fact, he said as much! Even going so far as to plead to a court bailiff who’d routinely tried talking to Tim about Jesus, “Pastor Rick, I’m tired of hearing about Jesus. If he’s not real and able to save me, I want you to just take your pistol and blow my brains out!”
At that moment, in total despair, shame and frustration, Deputy and Preacher Rick May began praying with Tim over his desk at the County Attorney’s office. Tim’s long suppressed faith combined with his moment of need to create a spark of hope and he was saved at that desk.
Tim began praying, studying his Bible, and consulting with Rick May as he nurtured his faith. He was soon baptized, and had a new and profound sense of mission.
Tim compares that moment to something like a “Road to Damascus” conversion. He was going in the completely opposite direction, was mugged by forces of darkness, and awoke to hope.
People who know Tim well know that he doesn’t like to play small ball. Like a master politician, he gets inside of an issue, studies it relentlessly, and quickly owns it. This was the case for his addiction. The addict became the expert on his own disease.
Now, like some modern day Matthew, who had received the Gospel while sitting at the tax collector’s table (the county attorney is also tasked with collecting delinquent tax accounts), Tim had been brought to a new mission in life. He externalized his studies of addiction and began doing what he could to fight the problem.
Given the lack of treatment centers in in that area, Tim felt that one of the biggest needs was transportation to-and-from treatment. So he started a transport ministry in 2008 and began offering men in despair a ride to help.
“I went from being an attorney to a taxi cab driver. Only I wasn’t collecting fare; I was offering hope,” Tim likes to say, only half-jokingly.
A year went by, and Tim turned his sights on something more audacious. He decided to found a women’s treatment center in Louisa.
Opening a treatment center in that era required a lot of patience and fortitude, and even more prayer. Today, addiction treatment in rural America is covered by medical insurance and Medicaid. In those days, it was almost exclusively donations and UNITE vouchers. Tim plowed ahead and opened Karen’s Place, a treatment center for women located on a beautiful property off Yatesville Lake in Lawrence County.
Opening this single center had taught Tim three valuable lessons.
First, not everyone in the community was welcoming of addiction treatment. The way the war on drugs and the growing opioid epidemic was playing out, there was extensive cynicism that addiction was not a disease, and not simply a behavioral issue. “We don’t want addicts here,” was the message many spewed.
Another challenge Tim had to confront was that there wasn’t a team trained in addiction-treatment to support this kind of work. It had to be built from the ground up, and that meant finding volunteers and potential employees whose hearts were in the right place, but who had little if any formal training in running a rehab center.
Finally, how do you pay for all this?? Donations are scarce, UNITE vouchers can’t pay for everyone, and while new insurance and benefits were on the way, it would be months and, in some cases, years before they would totally arrive.
Location, people and investment. They were business challenges without an easy fix. And for want of a fix, the bodies were piling up. Literally. The opioid epidemic was raging, killing dozens in eastern Kentucky, annually. In the wake of these deaths, dozens more were incarcerated, and hundreds of families were being broken.
It was as if drugs were making a wasteland of the Appalachia mountains. Yet, as the Bible says, in Isaiah, “I am making a way in the desert and streams in the wasteland.”
Tim needed God to show him the way with Karen’s Place and so He did. The Karen’s Place group- Odyssey Inc.- took on partners, built a team, learned the financing and organized a successful treatment center.
Against all the odds, Karen’s Place survived and thrived. Along the way, Tim had gotten married and his best partner in his entrepreneurial endeavors was his wife, Lelia; guiding him, giving him encouragement where needed, throttling him where necessary, and constantly by his side.
By 2011, Tim and Lelia and their mission entered a new season: they decided to take on the founding of a men’s treatment center in Fleming County.
The new center was opened in 2012 and was christened Belle Grove Springs, and a new company was created to manage the two centers: Addiction Recovery Care.
After this second center, Tim and Lelia’s mission gained pace. In 4 more years, 4 additional centers were added. Then, a pregnancy center for expectant moms suffering from addiction. Outpatient was created to treat people who graduated from ARC centers, and still needed help. The company ventured into new locations: Lexington, Mount Sterling and the northern Kentucky suburbs of Cincinnati.
Still the company grew. By 2018, ARC would count nearly 30 programs across 12 counties in Kentucky. The mission had grown from a single employee- Tim- in 2008, to nearly 500 in a decade. 165 of these employees were ARC graduates- men and women who’d walked the journey from crisis to career.
As ARC closes its first decade, and Tim surveys the future, he finds many of the same challenges: people, location and investment. How does the company find the resources to continue growing? Where does it open new centers? And who will be tapped from the ranks of ARC’s graduates to lead the various projects? These are questions that consume much of Tim’s waking hours.
Today, Tim has a beautiful family and a wife who’s been his partner throughout most of his recovery journey. He is surrounded by people who love him and people who need him. He is a highly successful entrepreneur and now has, like so many of ARC’s employees, a new career that sprouted from the wreckage of a crisis. His is a story that might fairly be called “from crisis to a new career”, and as a result of his and Lelia’s work over the past decade, thousands of people – employees and clients – are discovering and living out their God-given destiny.
Addiction Recovery Care’s motto is simple: From Crisis to Career- #FromCrisisToCareer .
ARC is a substance use disorder treatment company based in Louisa. It has outpatient and in-patient facilities around Kentucky. It gives select clients with 60 days of residential treatment the option to become an intern, and to simultaneously continue with their treatment and learn the “ins and outs” of operating a treatment program. As a specialty area of this practice, ARC provides maternity and crisis-stabilization support for women.
ARC believes supporting a client’s discovery of a sense of purpose combined with employment is a critical factor in long-term recovery, and it prides itself on helping clients first achieve sobriety and then helping them discover their God-given destiny. To learn more, or to get help for a loved one, visit www.ArcCenters.com.
