Inside a wood manufacturing plant in Petoskey, Michigan, Stephanie Koste looks at the list of work orders for her day packaging wood veneers. The veneer she’s working on could become part of a guitar, a door, or a kitchen cabinet.

She’s been at this job for about a year and a half. She found it after leaving rehab.

“I was addicted to heroin and meth for about 10 years,” Koste said. “I lost my kids, I lost my house. I lost everything.”

Northern Michigan, known for its resort towns and inland lakes, has large rehab centers tucked away in the woods, like the one Koste checked herself into after losing her home in Battle Creek, Michigan.

For people in recovery from drug or alcohol addiction, finding work after finishing a rehab program is tough. Many face an uphill battle with debt, gaps in their employment history, sometimes a criminal record, and the stigma associated with substance use.

But an employer in northern Michigan is hiring them: Manthei Wood Products, in Petoskey, Michigan, which has faced a regional labor shortage.

After coming up north for rehab, Koste didn’t want to go back to Battle Creek. The job she got at the Manthei wood plant allowed her to stay.

Abe Manthei, one of the owners of the company, said they realized they needed more staff during COVID, when many families redid their kitchens and orders for new kitchen cabinets were pouring in.

So, they started posting flyers in the rehab centers in town.

“People are coming from other places to those inpatient centers, and they don't want to go back home,” he said. “They want to restart their life.”

People were taking the jobs at Manthei, but many needed housing. And sometimes, they needed help staying sober.

The company decided to take a formerly abandoned motel in the nearby town of Charlevoix that they had already renovated and used for employee housing, and make it into a sober house for their staff in recovery.

They call it a “three-quarters house,” meaning it’s in between a halfway house and completely independent living. People have their own private units, but there’s a recovery coach who lives on site.

“It’s not just substance-use coaching, it’s life skills coaching,” said Manthei. “It’s [getting] your driver’s license back, [saving] money for a car.”

$100 a month of each person’s rent at the recovery house goes into a savings account that they can eventually use as the first month’s rent on an apartment or house.

Peggy Swarbrick, a professor at Rutgers University who studies addiction recovery, said that for people re-entering daily life sober, “employment — having a purposeful, meaningful structure to your day — is essential for someone in that transitioning.”

Manthei said he thinks other companies could make this work too, especially those in similar rural resort communities with rehab centers. But it takes the right recovery coach to guide people through the transition back to work.

Stephanie Koste, meanwhile, is starting to rebuild her life. She just moved into her own house and has room in her life now for hobbies, like photography and rock collecting along the shores of Lake Michigan.

“I'm coming up on two years clean in February, and I’m still trying to piece together who I am and who I want to be,” she said.

Eventually, her goal is to become a recovery coach herself.