Living in a post pandemic world, we have certainly emerged stronger than ever before. This year was one for momentous groundbreakings and growth, and we could not be prouder of our team. We set in motion construction on our new Middletown Clinic, New Britain Residential Clinic, and officially opened our Manchester Memorial Garden, which is a beautiful sanctuary for community members to gather and remember loved ones lost to the disease of addiction. If you have not seen the garden, please feel free to visit at 335 Broad Street behind our Manchester Clinic.
In addition to our groundbreaking ceremonies, and grand opening, our Board of Directors also approved several new ventures that will continue to elevate the treatment and care that we provide our nearly 6,000 patients daily. In the year to come, we will be adding Recovery Coaches, facilitating In-Home Addiction Treatment services, and looking to revamp our current clinics, like our Main Street Clinic in Hartford, which will be moving to a brand-new state-of-the-art facility on Lafayette Street.
Our research endeavors also continue to be robust, and this year, we were able to further strengthen our commitment to making strides in the mental health and addiction treatment space. Our Advanced Recovery Institute, part of the Root Center for Advanced Recovery, provided $100,000 to UConn to support the research project of Dr. Yifrah Kaminer for his study on: Youth Opioid Overdose: Implementing Overdose Suicide Risk Assessment Solutions. This grant is a first of its kind for Root Center, and we were thrilled to support this academic research study to help advance research in mental health and addiction.
We are happy to say that Root Center has remained a strong partner to other non-profit organizations across our state by not only sponsoring, and assisting in various events, but also having our staff utilize their paid volunteer day to give back to an organization of their choice. We know that we are stronger together, and the work we do is strengthened by partnering with others.
We are eager to see what this next year will bring. Our team of nearly 300 employees continues to amaze us with the work they perform on a daily basis. As always, we know that progress is the destination, and recovery, like so many other things in life, is a journey.
Warmly,
Steven Zuckerman, President & CEO Bruce Simons, Board President
In March, we celebrated another ground breaking, this time, in New Britain. Last year, we were proud to relocate our long-standing clinic on Whiting Street to a new state-ofthe-art facility on East Main Street, leaving our previous location empty. With our promise to serve every community we are in, we decided to re-purpose the Whiting Street facility and using our own funds, we started building Root Center’s first residential treatment facility. This new clinic, opening in fall 2024, will have 16 beds, eight for men and eight for women, and will allow clients who need more long-term care, a safe space to recover.
As we continue to grow and expand our locations, we were thrilled to secure zoning approval and to begin building a state-of-the-art clinic on Lafayette Street that will replace our oldest facility - Doctor’s Clinic on Main Street. The Root Center is committed to making sure all of our clinics are state-of-the-art and make both the staff and patients feel proud to walk through our doors every time they come to one of our facilities. More to come on this substantial new clinic next year.
August was an exciting month as we cut the ribbon to celebrate the opening of our Memorial Garden at our Manchester Clinic. In honor of International Overdose Awareness Day on August 31st, more than 100 people joined us for the opening and to remember those lost to the disease of addiction. The Memorial Garden is a beautiful sanctuary where family and friends can honor the memory of loved ones lost to overdose. We welcome anyone to come visit the space at 335 Broad Street in Manchester.
This past year was filled with ground breaking moments… both figuratively, and literally. In February, we officially started building our newest, and Middlesex County’s first, mental health and addiction treatment clinic offering methadone. Methadone clinics were previously outlawed in Middlesex County, and when we started our journey to bringing a Clinic to this community, the statistics were staggering. In 2020, this area of the state had seen the highest year-overyear increase in overdose deaths. Media partners, community members, and local legislators came to celebrate the day we broke ground at 392 Washington Street in Middletown. We anticipate a grand opening in early 2024!
The Root Center is dedicated to helping those in need of mental health and addiction treatment, and in recent years, the adolescent population across the country has rapidly grown to be an underserved audience for these services. As a result, the Root Center developed and rolled out school based services across many communities in Connecticut last year. We currently serve the populations of 10 different schools across 5 different districts. Additionally, we offer treatment outside of school at our Middletown Clinic for teens aged 13-17. Root Center has a robust system of services specifically designed to support teens struggling with mental health concerns, ranging from medication management and counseling to our Teen Intensive Outpatient Program (IOP).
At the Root Center, we continually look for new ways to offer treatment because we know that recovery looks different for everyone, and treatment is not a one-size-fits-all model. For some, seeking treatment at a facility may not be the best option or can sometimes be physically impossible. This year, we decided to make an investment in creating a new in-home addiction treatment service, realizing that these services are only financially supported via state insurance, self-pay, or very specific commercial insurances. Our team planned the offering and ironed out the logistics for this massive undertaking, which will be rolled out in the coming year.
Another Root-funded initiative is the hiring of Recovery Coaches. Root is planning to bring on Recovery Coaches at each of our clinics. A Recovery Coach is someone who is a certified staff member with lived experience and understanding of the addiction recovery process. Our Coaches understand and embrace medication assisted recovery, multiple pathways to recovery, as well as, overdose prevention models. We believe having recovery coaches on staff will help elevate our quality of care and help diversify our staff and treatment offerings.
While Root remains committed to serving our patients, we also strive to connect with other local organizations in our clinic communities who can augment the healthcare services our patients receive. We believe that we are stronger together and this year, we teamed up with Wheeler Health and InterCommunity Health Care to offer mobile clinics at a number of our sites. With the help of both of these agencies, we were able to offer our patients access to vaccines and routine health exams, right in the parking lot of our facilities.
This year, the Advanced Recovery Institute (ARI), an entity of Root which seeks to elevate clinical care and patient outcomes by conducting research and sponsoring mental health and substance use disorder training and education programs, awarded its very first grant. ARI provided $100,000 to UConn to support Dr. Yifrah Kaminer’s research study Youth Opioid Overdose: Implementing Overdose Suicide Risk Assessment Solutions. The grant is a first of its kind for Root Center, and we are thrilled that we are now able to support academic research that will ultimately improve the services we can provide.
As part of our commitment to training and education, Root Center offers a robust internship program. This year, we welcomed students from 22 different universities - as near as UConn and as far away as Western New Mexico! Our internships are offered across various departments - from finance, to HR, quality and compliance, counseling, and moreand the options to grow and learn at Root are endless.
Research Grant AwardThe Advanced Recovery Institute also hosts Community Forums, and this year’s event was focused on Marijuana and the Impacts on Teen Mental Health and Development. Our forums are free, open to the public, and meant to serve as a round-table discussion with subject matter experts. For this year’s forum, we welcomed East Hartford
Mayor, Michael Walsh, East Hartford Director of Health and Social Services, Laurence Burnsed, Fine Fettle Retail
Purchasing Manager and Pharmacist, Eric Halpern, Dr. Surita Rao, a Psychiatrist who specializes in addiction medicine, Ashley Hickey, our Middletown Clinic Supervisor, who also oversees our adolescent services, and the newest member of our Board, former President of Hartford Healthcare Behavioral Health Network and former Commissioner of the Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services, Patricia Rehmer. It was a great evening filled with insightful conversation that we hope helped to educate and inform our participants. With the recent legalization of recreational marijuana, we felt this topic was not only relevant, but highly important to discuss.
To create further learning opportunities, the Root Center also hosts monthly Clinical Grand Rounds presentations. These presentations are free and open to the public, and offer continuing education units (CEUs). Our presenters are experts in their field and join us from across the country and on average, more than 60 people tune in to these discussions live. Every month’s event focuses on a different topic, and this year, we discussed important subjects like correctional psychiatry, youth suicide, using technology to deliver treatment for chronic pain and opioid use disorder, and much more. To learn more, you can watch recordings of all of these presentations on our YouTube page.
With our deep focus on the mental health and addiction space, we look to offer expertise to our media partners to share critical insights to the general public. This year, the FDA announced that Naloxone, also known as Narcan, will be readily available over the counter at locations like grocery stores, gas stations, and online. This is a huge step for the future of recovery, as this medication is designed to rapidly reverse opioid overdose. When this decision was announced, Root Center appeared on the Connecticut CBS affiliate, WFSB Channel 3, and the local Fox affiliate, FOX61, to discuss the greater impact this would have going forward. We value our media partners, and gladly make ourselves available to answer questions, and offer insight on mental health and addiction topics.
ROOT Center in Numbers
98,003
TOTAL MENTAL HEALTH SESSIONS
53,664 FACE-TO-FACE
44,339 TELEHEALTH
ELEVATING OUR PATIENT EXPERIENCE WITH NEXT-GENERATION FACILITIES
SQ FT OF NEW CLINIC FACILITIES
UNDER CONSTRUCTION OR IN FINAL PLANNING STAGES SQUARE FEET
CREATING NEW FACILITIES FOR MORE THAN
50,000+
5,000
SIGNIFICANT CAPITAL RENOVATION PROJECTS AT PATIENTS
7
OTHER CLINICS
GROWTH OF STAFF RESEARCH TO ADVANCE OUR FIELD
83 9
NEW HIRES STUDIES PARTICIPATED IN WITH YALE, UCONN AND OTHER LEADING INSTITUTIONS
29
TOTAL INTERNS FROM 22 DIFFERENT UNIVERSITIES
ISSUED FIRST RESEARCH GRANT OF
$100,000
7,978
This year was certainly a year for growth in our facilities, our services, and our team! Most recently, the Root Center added Cheri Golia as our new Chief of Human Resources, Ben Metcalf, Chief of Operations, Coley Jones, Director of Quality and Compliance, Shelby Dumond, Director of Finance, and Spencer Duclos, our first Talent Acquisition Specialist. These were just a few of many key hires that help continue to make Root an excellent place to work and recover.
Meet
Congratulations to our Nightingale Award for Nursing Excellence recipient, Cherie Bochenko, PMHNP-BC! Every year, this award is given to a nurse who demonstrates “exceptional courage and devotion,” and it is the highest international distinction a nurse can achieve. Cherie joined Root Center in March 2020 at the start of a once-in-a-century global pandemic, and hit the ground running, quickly becoming a pivotal and immensely valuable member of the Admissions team. She models exemplary clinical judgment and her experience and expertise has helped shape her ability to act as a valuable resource to clinical and medical staff across Root Center. Cherie’s patient-centered approach and commitment to addressing the physical, emotional, and mental health aspects of opioid use disorder is unmatched—she is a true patient advocate, and we are lucky to have her on our team!
The Root Center is routinely involved in community events across our state in the cities and towns we serve. This year, some of the events we enjoyed included Middletown Pride, Recovery Fest in Groton, Willimantic’s Third Thursdays, Hands on Hearts, CCAR Recovery Walks, and so much more. Root staff members are always connecting and supporting others who share a passion and mission to help those in need. We take pride in being a leader in the mental health and addiction space in Connecticut, and we believe that our mission and reach is strengthened by supporting others who do the same. Whether we are sponsoring, participating, or donating to an event, you can always count on Root Center to support the great work being done by so many organizations across our state.
Not only do we participate in community events, we also offer our staff the opportunities to attend education and skill building events. This year, we were thrilled to return to the National Association of Social Work Conference, which brings together many of the top leaders in our field. We also enjoyed the Connecticut Certification Board Association Conference, the CT Association of School Based Health Centers Conference, and the Trauma and Recovery Conference, just to name a few. While we are stronger together when we support other community initiatives, we also become stronger when we team up with others to learn and to grow. These conferences and gatherings afford our staff the chance to expand their knowledge and resources to be able to better serve our patients who trust us to provide the highest level of care possible each and every day.
While we here at the Root Center love to give back to others, we were also fortunate to have others give back to us! This year, Silk City Coffee in Manchester, a local coffee shop and eatery that routinely gives back to organizations, picked Root as one of its organizations to support.
We were honored that Silk City hosted a fundraising day where 20% of all proceeds went to the Root Center! We can’t thank Silk City enough for their generosity, and delicious treats, as well!
In honor of Mental Health Awareness month, in May, we were honored to host a Mental Health Round-table Discussion at our New Britain Clinic. Special thanks to our attendees: CT State Comptroller Sean Scanlon, who facilitated and organized the event, DMHAS Commissioner Nancy Navarretta, DCF Commissioner, Vanessa Dorantes, Root Center President/CEO, Steven Zuckerman, Wheeler Clinic President/CEO, Sabrina Trocchi, Wheeler Clinic MFT, Tiffany Hubrins, Wheeler Clinic MFT, Emily Kahnke, Chair of Psychiatry, Institute of Living; Chief of Psychiatry, Hartford Hospital, Javeed Sukhera, Hartford Hospital Government Relations, Melissa Riley. With a mental health crisis ensuing across our state and country, it is of immense importance to have ongoing discussions on mental health and how to improve the future of treatment and recovery for all those in need of assistance.
At Root Center, one of our values is to “renew ourselves to share our strengths.” So, with that in mind, we like to offer ways for our staff to enjoy themselves and have some fun! An annual tradition that we were proud to continue is our Thanksgiving Lyman Orchard Apple Pie distribution. Every year, every single staff member is given a fresh apple pie ahead of the Thanksgiving holiday as a small token of our gratitude and thanks. We also brought back our ice cream day with an ice cream truck visiting and delivering free treats to each of our 10 clinics. Lake Compounce is another fun tradition that we continued where staff and their families were able to enjoy this famed Connecticut amusement park, along with a barbecue with fellow coworkers and friends. Our Wellness Committee, which helps find ways to bring relaxation and fun to staff, also planned a free smoothie day, chair massage day, and even a paint night! As we emerge from years of COVID restrictions, we were most thrilled to finally be able to come back together for an in-person holiday celebration at Farmington Gardens. Staff enjoyed good food, music, prizes, caricature paintings, and most importantly, face-to-face interaction that we had been missing for so long.
Free Smoothie Day
Holiday Party Apple Pie Tradition
Ice Cream Truck Lake Compounce Chair Massage Day
At Root Center, we are always looking to the future, and trying to find ways to better our organization as a whole. This year, we welcomed a new Board member who we know will be instrumental in doing just that! Patricia Rehmer, known affectionately as Pat, is a registered nurse by trade, and has a long history in the world of behavioral health. She was the former Commissioner of the Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services (DMHAS) from 2009-2015. Following that, she became the Senior Vice President of Hartford Healthcare (HHC) and President of the Behavioral Health Network (BHN), from 2015-2021 when she retired. Just last year, she was also a panelist at our Community Forum on Safe Consumption Sites, and a panelist on this year’s forum, as well, and has long been an advocate for the work that we do at the Root Center. We know she will be an invaluable asset to our Board, and we are thrilled that she is joining us!
Our team routinely comes together to find ways to better our workflow and standard practices. We love hosting affiliation work group meetings and lunch and learns where management and staff come together to discuss ways to improve and how best to serve our patients. We believe it is crucial to never stop learning, and collaboration is one of the best ways to enhance that mission.
Another way that we made sure to set ourselves up for success in the years to come was by having a three-year strategic planning retreat with our directors, executive leadership, and board members. Together at the Hill-Stead Museum in Farmington, our team brainstormed ideas on how to continue to grow and improve the Root Center for Advanced Recovery in the years to come, and the future looks exciting! Teamwork makes the dream work because we are stronger together.
Strategic Planning Retreat
The Root leadership team is committed to positively impacting the lives of those around us and to continuing to add more talented team members to deliver on our Mission.
Officers: Bruce Simons, Chairperson Darcie Boiano, Secretary • Steven Zuckerman, President/CEO
Directors: Stephen Fisher, Dave Louden, John Mohring, William E. Schumann, Dr. David Hopkins, Dr. Martin Anderson, Dr. Carla Rash, Eric Zachs, Patricia Rehmer*
* Advised the Board of Directors in FY 22/23, officially joined in FY23/24
Hi, my name is Jim, I am 56 years old, and by the grace of God, and the Root Center, my life was given back to me. 25 years ago, I was diagnosed with OCD, Anxiety, and Depression. Five years after that, I hurt my back very badly, and started opioids, which eventually turned into a heroin addiction. That is when a friend of mine told me about Hartford Dispensary, now Root Center, which offered Methadone Maintenance.
I’ve only had two counselors over the years, Ray Bishop, was my main counselor, he has been with Root for 20 years! With his help, and my commitment to diligently working the program, my life was saved. I am now substance free 20 years, and with my dual-diagnosis, and my addictive behavior, I will continue to do groups, and work the program because I never want to go back to that lifestyle that put me in such a dark place. It was a miserable way to live, and the life I have now, is one that I am proud of, and I look forward to every morning when I wake up. Remember, anyone can do this, trust in the process, and trust in the Root Center, because this place saved my life, and I know it can save yours, too. God Bless.
Our purpose is to create relationships that empower the courage and ability to change.
This means being there from the start and providing guidance and support throughout the entire recovery journey.
We are caring, intelligent people committed to supporting others. As an organization, we are committed to supporting our people as they continue to grow, develop and advance.
Renew ourselves to share our strength
Embrace new perspectives
Progress is the destination
