Giving the individuals that she counsels at The Victory Connector, a low-threshold navigation center in the neighborhood run by the nonprofit Maverick House Review, a feeling of care, a sense of calm and peace, is what she aims for each day. In order to help each individual or family succeed, we offer evidence-based services with a proven record of success like motivational interviewing and peer support to help our clients stabilize their lives and find their way home. We provide high-quality, evidence-based services based on individual needs, offering flexible, strengths-based solutions to people’s biggest challenges.
She provides counseling to the most entrenched individuals at Mass. and Cass. She wants you to know her story.
She ended up working as a staff member at Casa Esperanza for almost 12 years, becoming first a peer recovery coach, then a house manager, then a treatment coordinator, a senior treatment coordinator, and a supervisor. We are excited to bring you the latest issue of Maverick House Review’ print newsletter, The Doorway! The Fall edition is packed with inspiring stories and messages of resilience, generosity, and hope from our clients, staff, and supporters who are transforming lives and strengthening our communities.
“It took me a while to understand that I had so much in me to give that I hadn’t seen. But others did.”
But now, with 24 years in recovery, the Dorchester resident hopes that by talking about her own experiences, others might be encouraged to speak up. She’s also hopeful that people who are quick to judge the unsheltered individuals, still in the throes of their own crises of addiction and mental health, living around Mass. and Cass might gain greater understanding from hearing her story. When the only option for women who had been designated a danger to themselves or others due to substance use disorders needed a community-based treatment option as an alternative to incarceration, we were there to offer a solution. We have always stood on the front lines, ready to identify and address the unmet needs in our community. Ready to help individuals and families with nowhere else to go find their way home. The Victory Connector, where she is a harm reduction specialist, provides a range of services to women, transgender, and nonbinary individuals who are at high risk of overdose and who are reluctant to engage with other care systems.
Maverick House Review is a Boston-based nonprofit organization dedicated to helping individuals and families who are homeless and may have substance use disorders, often accompanied by chronic health issues like HIV/AIDS, Hepatitis C and mental illness. Providing a welcoming environment, our compassionate and inspiring team is committed to helping them regain their health and restore their hope through immediate access to safe and stable housing. The individuals and families we serve are homeless or precariously housed —but their challenges are even more complicated. The great majority have histories of trauma, chronic substance use, and mental health issues.
- In order to help each individual or family succeed, we offer evidence-based services with a proven record of success like motivational interviewing and peer support to help our clients stabilize their lives and find their way home.
- By the time that she was about 8, her mother moved the family to Springfield, Massachusetts.
- Rivera starts each day with a cup of coffee and greets her staff, ensuring the plan is set for the day.
- We focus on what a person is doing “well,” with a nurturing effect that fosters continued effort from the first steps toward progress and growth.
“Every time I had an appointment, they had somebody to come with me because it’s how I felt safe,” she said. By Maverick House Review Review the time she was 16, she’d been introduced to drugs by one of her mother’s friends, she said. “We were always left alone, and the violence that was in the house was not normal,” she said of living with her mother. By the time she was 10 or 11, Rivera and her siblings were placed in foster care because of their mother’s alcohol use.
Maverick House Review, Inc.
Each day, she and her colleagues at the Connector also do about two hours of street outreach, rotating who stays in the office and who goes out. When people come in, she and her colleagues offer hot meals and find out what their needs may be. They make sure people have clean needles and talk to those who are engaged with sex work, asking how they are keeping themselves safe. When Rivera was moved to Casa Esperanza’s new housing on Eustis Street, she again felt flooded with feelings of fear and nervousness about the change, she recalled.
House the person
By the time that she was about 8, her mother moved the family to Springfield, Massachusetts. But she said it’s also taken her a long time to feel comfortable sharing what she experienced as a child and teenager, which resulted in her own years-long struggle with substance use, incarceration, and instability. Being able to provide that respite and getting to see individuals who have come in from the street smile (she calls them “members”) is the best, she told Boston.com. Coping with those deaths, and the prospect that she will likely see more as the state and country continue to grapple with the overdose crisis, Rivera said she relies on belief — and the knowledge that change doesn’t happen overnight. Rivera starts each day with a cup of coffee and greets her staff, ensuring the plan is set for the day.
Almost half live with HIV/AIDS, Hepatitis C, and/or other chronic health conditions. When individuals and families are safely housed, they’re much more likely to address their physical and mental health, addictions, and other issues. Our housing stabilization services, including emergency shelter, transitional and permanent housing, and case management, move people off the street as quickly as possible, with as few barriers as possible.
She began having dreams about her past, and she was prescribed medications to help with the nightmares. Over the course of roughly the next 15 years, Rivera continued to deal with instability and the effects of her trauma. If you would like to join our mailing list to automatically receive our publications by mail, fill out the form below or email your name and address to