Ryan Cormier, Delaware News Journal |
Published 5:27 a.m. ET Oct. 21, 2024 Updated 5:27 a.m. ET Oct. 21, 2024
For 80 years, families gathered at 810 N. Union St. in Wilmington to grieve the loss of their loved ones, some of which had succumbed to drug or alcohol addiction.
The somber gatherings were held at the Corleto Latina Funeral Home tucked away in the city’s Little Italy neighborhood, a building that hosted heartbreaking scenes as families gathered to say goodbye too soon.
But after eight decades of anguish between those walls, the pain has been replaced by hope.
Instead of a place for mourning deaths due to addiction, it has transformed into a residence for rebirth and renewal, dedicated to helping those fighting against their addiction and building a new life.
The former funeral home has been sold and is now home to the non-profit Recovery Cafe, a peer-run, community-based recovery gathering spot offering an array of services and support to people in recovery.
It is there where Domenica Personti, CEO of Impact Life, which runs the cafe, takes note of irony.
“It’s kind of odd and wild that we end up here in a place that was typically very sad in its past,” Personti says in an interview in the cafe’s main room, surrounded by Halloween decorations, including six tombstones.
“And now with us, how many people are going to come here and find life, right?” she says.”They are going to come here broken, traumatized, sad, lonely, isolated, hurt and unwell. But then they will get around this staff and find life again.”
Dedicated to helping others
Personti knows all about those feelings herself.
As does Recovery Cafe director Michael Kalmbach, founder of the Creative Vision Factory, a downtown Wilmington peer-run, arts-focused program for people on the behavioral health spectrum, which closed earlier this year after a 13-year run.
And so does everyone who works at Recovery Cafe, built to be a safe space for people to build community as they heal and recover.
Everyone who works there are also in different stages of recovery themselves; now sober after being entrapped by addiction and dedicated to helping others build a new life without drugs or alcohol.
In fact, Salvatore Latina, director of the Corleto Latina Funeral Home, which now operates from a larger space directly across the street, has also been in recovery himself for years.
He says the mission of Recovery Cafe made the transition of leaving the building a lot easier.After all, it’s where he spent a lot of his childhood, watching as his father Anthony ran the funeral home before becoming director himself.
Latina knows all about addiction and its impact not only to the person struggling, but also their family and the community as a whole. He has seen firsthand as the number of funerals for overdose deaths have steadily risen.
“I know from personal experience it’s avoidable. With the right program, help and motivation, you can work your way through it,” Latina says. “I could not have handpicked abetter company or people to take over that space. I’ve seen the community around us deteriorating because of addiction and mental illness.
“This area has needed something like Recovery Cafe for a long time. We are so thrilled to do our little part to help it happen.”
Recovery hubs across Delaware
Wilmington’s Recovery Cafe is the newest venture from Impact Life, which was formed in2021 by Personti, who has nearly 25 years of experience working in behavioral health and harm reduction, including stints with Recovery Center of America and Brandywine Counseling & Community Services.
Impact Life, which is largely funded by grants, individual donors and foundation money, has seen its annual budget expand from $182,000 when it started to $6.2 million next year.
Recovery Cafe joins Impact Life’s growing ecosystem of recovery hubs across Delaware, which includes community and resource centers in Georgetown, Glasgow, Seaford and Elsmere.
They also run the 17-acre Sanctuary at Impact Life Farm in Seaford, Delaware’s first recovery farm, which opened last year. The agriculture-based recovery program includes permanent housing and workforce development paired with case management, spiritual support, therapeutic arts and more.
In addition, Impact Live owns and operates 16 residential homes across the state for peoplein recovery.
The Wilmington Recovery Cafe location, which cost $520,000, is their first cafe. A second should come online in Georgetown next year, Personti says.
Recovery Cafes are accredited members of the Recovery Cafe Network, a national series of about 70 locations across the country. Through their model, they create sober spaces to build a community surrounded by healing and nurturing, stressing accountability, empowerment and responsibility.
The staff of each cafe goes through training and are provided with mentorship, materials and expertise to create their own Recovery Cafe community, following the national model.
There is one other Recovery Cafe currently operating in Delaware. It opened this past summer in Dover and is run by Network Connect, a Wilmington-based community non-profit organization.
What to know about Recovery Cafe programs
At Wilmington’s Recovery Cafe, the doors are open Monday through Friday 9:30 a.m. to4:30 p.m. to anyone who considers themselves in recovery from just about anything ranging from drugs and alcohol to homelessness and domestic violence.
If they come more than a few times, they must become a member and abide by the same rules as all others in the cafes across the network.
Members must be drug and alcohol free when they arrive. If they are not and need help, they will be transported to Impact Life’s Elsmere resource center which offers food, shelter, healthcare and other forms of support in partnership with the Elsmere Police Department.Members also must participate in weekly peer support groups called “recovery circles” and contribute back to the cafe or the community in some manner.
The Wilmington location is about to begin a winter renovation project to help transform the former funeral home into more of a cafe, complete with a coffee countertop and seating, a porch out front and larger windows. Eventually, they hope to renovate the pair of upstairs bedrooms into a adolescents-only Recovery Cafe space.
“With this Recovery Cafe model, there’s a ton of room to create all kinds of different support groups. It’s a big tent,” says Kalmbach, who has brought some of his arts-based support programs from Creative Vision Factory to Recovery Cafe, which already has a dedicated arts room.
At Recovery Cafe, he leads a pair of guided meditation “recovery circles” each day and eachweek the cafe offers blocks of time for everything from yoga and crafts to garden walks andworkplace development.
For Personti, this project is extra special as a Little Italy native, who grew up only a few blocks from her Recovery Cafe. She remembers regularly walking the neighborhood with her grandmother, stopping everywhere from the five-and-dime store and the DiFonzo Bakery to a family friend’s shoe shop and Sansone’s Seafood Market, where her grandmother would buy rabbit meat for rabbit soup.
“My whole life was right here, so this has been pretty powerful and special to me,” she says.
After years of managing funerals where Recovery Cafe now stands and being in recoveryhimself, Latina says he knows that a new support center like Recovery Cafe can help savelives and build up community where there once was deterioration.
“Dying from addiction is different than, say, cancer. With cancer, all the effort in the worldmay still end you in the same spot,” he says. “But with addiction, if you get the rightresources, you can overcome it and live a successful and healthy life.”
View article: https://www.delawareonline.com/story/life/2024/10/21/delaware-recovery-cafe-2025/75631165007/