More than five decades ago, Jere Stabley and a group of friends spent their Tuesday and Wednesday evenings and much of their Saturdays working on a house in Lititz.
It needed to be cleaned and painted. The floors needed work. For about five months, the group did much of it themselves.
They were building the first home of what would eventually become The GateHouse.
The need was real. Lancaster had no place where people could go after completing acute rehabilitation to find continued recovery support as they began rebuilding their lives. Jere understood that need personally. He had entered Alcoholics Anonymous several years earlier and met many fellow founders of The GateHouse there.
For them, creating The GateHouse was a way of taking what they had learned through their own experiences and using it to help the people coming behind them. “It felt good to give something back to the community after taking so much,” Jere later recalled. More than 54 years later, that idea remains woven into the work of The GateHouse.
Recovery Happens Together
September is National Recovery Month, and one of the themes of the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration’s 2026 campaign is “Recovery Happens Together.”
The message recognizes something The GateHouse has understood since its earliest days: recovery requires deeply personal effort, but that effort can be strengthened through relationships, structure, opportunity, and community.
Last month, we explored the people who can become part of a strong recovery support network. Counselors, case managers, sponsors, peers, family members, employers, and others can each play a different role in helping someone move forward.
Those connections can have an impact beyond the person receiving support. Sometimes, the person being helped today becomes the person helping someone else tomorrow.
When Support Comes Full Circle
Throughout The GateHouse’s history, paying it forward has been part of the recovery process.
Yannick Harris once came to The GateHouse needing structure and accountability in his own life. Curfews, daily commitments, and program expectations helped provide consistency while he worked through the early stages of recovery. Over time, his role changed.
Yannick eventually returned to The GateHouse as a counselor, putting his own experience to work helping people travel a road he already knew.
Meagan Halbleib, a recovery specialist at The GateHouse, has had a similar experience. Her own recovery now informs the work she does with others.
Working at The Gatehouse allows me to use my lived experience in recovery to help others be successful in their recovery,” she said. “Working here has given purpose to my life.”
Not every recovery story follows the same path because no two journeys begin exactly the same way. But for some people, recovery creates a deeper understanding of what another person may be going through. They remember the fear, uncertainty, frustration, or shame that can accompany those early steps because they have felt those things themselves.
For others, it leads to a career in behavioral health or recovery services. Others may become sponsors or mentors. In many cases, it can be something less formal: listening, sharing perspective, providing encouragement, or simply showing someone that another life is possible.
What was once given to them becomes something they can pass along.
The Value of Someone Who Has Been There
Professional treatment, counseling, case management, and other services remain essential parts of recovery, but lived experience brings something different to the table.
Someone who has traveled through recovery may understand the raw fear of starting over, the frustration of being held accountable, the difficulty of changing familiar patterns, or the uncertainty of trying to build an entirely different life.
For someone just beginning that journey, there can also be empowerment in meeting another person who has already traveled farther down the road and seeing how they’ve succeeded. They’re evidence that change is possible. It could be a sponsor at a meeting, a peer offering support, a counselor drawing on personal experience, or simply someone willing to listen without judgment.
At The GateHouse, mentorship like this reaches all the way back to Jere and the people who helped establish the organization. They knew what it meant to need support while rebuilding a life. So, they created a place where others could find it.
A Community That Keeps Giving Extra
What happens inside a treatment or recovery program lays the foundation. But eventually, recovery has to live in the world outside of it.
That’s where the larger community becomes important.
A person rebuilding a life may need an employer willing to offer an opportunity, a family member ready to rebuild trust, a recovery group that can provide belonging, or a community organization that can help solve a practical problem.
These connections can be life-changing and enduring, or they can be much smaller and temporary. Either way, they’re beneficial. Over time, the person who once benefited from those connections may find themselves in a position to offer that same support to someone else. It’s part of what makes a recovery-ready community so powerful. The impact doesn’t stop with the person receiving help.
Lancaster County has been part of that story since the beginning of The GateHouse. The organization itself grew out of people in recovery recognizing a need in their community and deciding to do something about it.
Today, families, employers, treatment professionals, recovery organizations, community partners, volunteers, and supporters continue to help create the conditions in which recovery can take hold and people can build lives they want to sustain.
The People Who Connect Us
That idea will continue to guide The GateHouse as we move toward this year’s ExtraGive and our theme, The People Who Connect Us.
For more than five decades, people have helped connect individuals at The GateHouse with care, accountability, opportunity, resources, and one another. Some are professionals. Some are family members, employers, sponsors, peers, or friends. And some know exactly what it feels like to need that connection because someone once provided it for them.
That was true when Jere Stabley and his friends began working on a house in Lititz more than half a century ago. It remains true today among people like Yannick and Meagan.
The faces may change, but the act of paying it forward does not.
If you or someone you care about is ready to begin a recovery journey, contact The GateHouse to learn about available programs and support. Those who want to strengthen recovery in Lancaster County can follow The GateHouse as we prepare to share more about this year’s ExtraGive campaign.
