Twenty years.
One simple idea.

OHC is a registered peer-led recovery charity based in Coventry. We have been providing supported housing for men in recovery for over 20 years.

Support at Open Hands is built on shared experience, daily structure, and mutual responsibility. Residents are not managed from a distance or treated as case numbers. They become part of a community where the man offering support today may once have arrived here needing the same help himself.

The thing that makes OHC different is not a programme or a method. It is the Helper Principle: one alcoholic or addict helping another. That is not a tagline. It is the actual structure of how the house works. Residents support each other. That peer support — resident to resident — is logged, recognised, and treated as the serious part of recovery that it is.

Stopping drinking or using is the easy part. Staying stopped is what is hard. The issues people were drinking or using to avoid do not go away — they need to be faced, in sober clarity, often for the first time. Addiction also takes away dignity and self-belief. Rebuilding both takes time, and the right environment.

We are a small charity with thirty-plus men in our care, with a small core of staff supplemented by volunteers who have been with us for some years. That is not a limitation — it is the point. Recovery happens in relationships, not in systems.