Key Takeaways
- Sedgwick County led Kansas in overdose deaths and death rate from 2020 through 2024, making sustained alumni connection a load-bearing part of recovery rather than an optional add-on 9.
- Holland Pathways pairs a daily-use app with monthly in-person events, creating a rhythm that keeps peer relationships warm between gatherings and reduces isolation after discharge.
- Before committing, weigh transit realities like 45 to 60-minute Wichita bus frequencies 12, how alumni support fits alongside outpatient care, and how families or veteran peers can plug in.
- Kansas recognizes peer mentoring as part of the official SUD continuum 7, and local settlement dollars back this direction, so staying tethered aligns with how the community funds recovery.
The Tuesday After Discharge
You probably remember the day you left treatment. Someone helped carry your bag. Maybe a counselor hugged you. There was a plan on paper, phone numbers to call, a schedule for the first week.
What you may not remember as clearly is the Tuesday after that. Not the celebration day. The one where you woke up in your own bed, brushed your teeth, and realized the whole day was suddenly yours to fill. No group at 10. No lunch at the table with people who knew exactly what you were going through. Just Tuesday.
That is the day long-term sobriety is actually decided. Not in detox. Not in the last week of residential. In the quiet stretch between discharge and whatever comes next, when the structure disappears and the cravings do not.
If you are reading this in Wichita, you already know the stakes are not theoretical. Sedgwick County lost 190 people to overdose in 2024 8. That is friends, coworkers, someone’s kid. It is the reason “aftercare” is not a soft word here. It is survival math.
This piece is about what happens next for you. Specifically, how a working alumni program, with monthly events and a dedicated app, keeps the Tuesday problem from becoming a month-three problem, then a year-two problem. You have already done the hardest part by getting through treatment. What follows is how to stay tethered to the people and the rhythm that make the next Tuesday easier than the last one.
What Sedgwick County’s Overdose Numbers Mean for Your Recovery
Here is the piece of local data that most people in recovery here do not have on hand, but should. Across 2020 through 2024, Sedgwick County ranked first in Kansas for both overdose deaths and overdose death rate, with 1,033 deaths and a rate of 40.5 per 100,000 residents 9. Not one of the highest. The highest.
That is not a number meant to scare you. You already know the fear. It is a number meant to reframe what the alumni piece of your recovery actually is. It is not an optional add-on. It is not a nice-to-have social club. In a county carrying this kind of weight, staying connected after discharge is closer to a load-bearing wall.
Think about what that ranking really describes. It means the pool of people around you who are struggling, who have used again, who did not make it, is larger per capita than anywhere else in the state. It means the person you used to get high with is statistically more likely to still be using. It means the corner store, the old neighborhood, the group text you never quite left, all of it sits inside a higher-risk environment than the Kansas average.
You cannot change the county you live in. What you can change is what surrounds you inside it.
This is where an alumni program stops being a marketing term and starts being infrastructure. When your day-to-day environment carries elevated risk, the counterweight has to be equally consistent. A monthly gathering with people who understand exactly where you have been. An app you can open at 11 p.m. on a Thursday when the wanting shows up early. A peer who texts back. These are small things. They are also the specific small things that separate people who stay in recovery from people who drift.
You are not fragile for needing this. You are responding accurately to your surroundings. Sedgwick County’s numbers say the environment is hard. Your response, staying tethered to a community that gets it, is the honest, adult answer to that reality. And you have already shown you can make hard, honest choices. You made one to get into treatment. The next one is smaller. It is just refusing to walk out of care and into isolation.
Why Peer Connection Is the Backbone of What Comes Next
There is a reason “just call someone” is the oldest advice in recovery. It works. Not because the person on the other end has a magic sentence, but because the wanting loses volume the moment you are no longer alone with it.
SAMHSA is direct on this point. Peer support workers, meaning people with their own lived experience of recovery, help others stay engaged in the recovery process and reduce the likelihood of relapse 1. That is not a soft claim about feelings. It is a description of what changes when someone who has been where you are stays in regular contact with you after treatment ends.
What SAMHSA calls peer recovery support services usually includes a few specific things: peer mentoring or coaching, facilitating recovery groups, and building community around people who are trying to stay sober 4. If those three phrases sound familiar, it is because they describe what a working alumni program actually does, week to week. A mentor who texts. A group that meets. A community that keeps a chair open for you whether you showed up last month or not.
The evidence on this holds across settings. Peer recovery support functions in recovery community centers, in recovery residences, in re-entry from the justice system, in veteran-heavy spaces 3. Different rooms, same mechanism. The person next to you knows. You do not have to translate.
This matters for you specifically because early recovery is when your own read on things is least reliable. The mind that got you into use is still, some days, running the projector. Peers are the second set of eyes. They notice when your voice on the app check-in sounds off. They remember what month three did to them, so they know what it might be doing to you. That is not a service tier. That is the backbone.
A Month Inside the Alumni Program
It helps to see what “staying connected” actually looks like on a calendar. Not the brochure version. The real one.
Holland Pathways’ alumni program runs on two rhythms that work together: a dedicated app you can open any day of the week, and monthly in-person events that bring the community into the same room. Neither one alone is the whole thing. The app without the events becomes a screen you stop noticing. The events without the app become a night you look forward to, then a long stretch of silence between. Put them together, and you get something closer to what SAMHSA describes as the actual mechanism of peer support, coaching and community-building that keep people engaged over time 4.
The next three subsections walk through what a month tends to look like, so you can picture yourself inside it before you commit. This is not a tour. It is a preview of the ordinary week where your recovery either holds or slips.
The App as a Daily Anchor
The app is not a novelty. It is the piece of the alumni program that lives in your pocket for the 29 days between events.
Think of it as the low-friction version of the group room you left behind. You open it to check in. You see who else checked in today. You send a message to a peer when the wanting shows up early or when a random Wednesday feels heavier than it should. You get a note back from someone who has been where you are, which is the specific thing SAMHSA identifies as the reason peer connection reduces relapse risk in the first place 1.
What makes the app work is not that it is high-tech. It is that it lowers the bar for reaching out. Picking up a phone at 10 p.m. and calling a sponsor is a big move. Tapping an app icon and typing three sentences is a small one. On the days when small is all you have, small is enough.
You will not use it every day. That is fine. The goal is not perfect attendance. The goal is that on the day you need it, opening it feels familiar, not foreign. If your only interaction with the recovery community is a monthly event, month three will find you with a phone full of numbers you have not called. If the app has been part of your daily background hum, the numbers are already warm.
Monthly Events as In-Person Reset
Once a month, the alumni community comes together in person. Same city, same people who understand, same permission to just be somewhere without explaining yourself.
These events matter for a reason a screen cannot replicate. You can read a peer’s message on the app and still feel alone in your kitchen. You cannot walk into a room of people who have been through what you have been through and feel the same way. Something in the nervous system settles. The recovery groups and community-building SAMHSA lists as core peer recovery support services work partly because bodies in the same space register safety differently than text does 4.
The format is intentionally low-pressure. There is food. There is conversation. There is often something to do, an activity, a shared meal, a speaker, but the point is not the activity. The point is that you showed up, saw familiar faces, and remembered that the community you built during treatment did not evaporate on discharge day.
You will not want to go every month. Some months the couch will win. When it does, do not treat the miss as failure. Treat it as data. Ask what got in the way, and put the next one on the calendar. One event a month, twelve times a year, is a real relationship with a community, not a token appearance. That is the cadence that keeps people tethered through the second and third year, when the initial urgency has faded but the risk has not.
How the Two Fit Together
The app and the monthly event are not two features. They are one rhythm.
Here is how it works in practice. You meet someone at February’s event who reminds you of yourself six months in. You add them on the app. Over the next three weeks, you trade a few messages, mostly small stuff. In early March, you have a rough Tuesday, and because that person is now a name in your app, not a stranger, you send a message. They respond. When you both walk into March’s event, you are not starting from zero. You are picking up a conversation.
That loop, in-person to digital to in-person again, is what SAMHSA is describing when it talks about peer recovery support functioning as ongoing community rather than a one-time contact 3. The events plant the relationships. The app keeps them alive between plantings. Neither piece is doing the job alone.
You do not have to master both immediately. Start with whichever feels less intimidating. If showing up in person feels like too much in month one, open the app and read. If the screen feels hollow, come to the event and skip the app for a while. Both doors lead to the same room.
Getting There: Transit, Timing, and Real Wichita Logistics
One of the quiet reasons people miss aftercare is not motivation. It is the ride.
If you have a car and gas money, this section is not for you. If you do not, or if your license is still tied up in a case, or if the car is in someone else’s name and that someone is not always around, the alumni event on the calendar can feel further away than it actually is. That is worth planning for before month two.
Wichita Transit runs a bus network anchored at the Downtown Transit Center, with route updates that took effect in August 2025 11. It is usable. It is also not frequent. Several routes run every 45 minutes, others every 60, and Saturday service holds at 60-minute frequencies 12. That means a missed connection is not a five-minute problem. It is a rest-of-the-hour problem.
Here is how to make that work instead of making it a reason to skip. Look up your route the week before, not the day of. Build in an extra 30 minutes on both ends. If the event lands on a Saturday, check the return schedule before you leave, because the last bus is earlier than you think. Ask someone in the app whether they are coming from your side of town. Rides get shared. That is part of what the community is for.
Getting there is a small logistics problem. Not showing up is a bigger one.
Where Alumni Support Fits in Kansas’s Continuum of Care
It helps to know that what you are doing when you stay in an alumni program is not freelancing. It is the last tier of a continuum the state of Kansas actually recognizes.
The Kansas Department for Aging and Disability Services lists peer mentoring, alongside outpatient care, reintegration treatment, and case management, as part of official substance use disorder treatment services 7. That matters because it means the ongoing peer connection you get from an alumni program is not extra credit. It sits inside the same continuum as detox and residential care, just further down the line. You are not stepping outside of treatment when you commit to alumni support. You are stepping into the part of it designed to last the longest.
Wichita and Sedgwick County have also put real money behind this direction. The Wichita-Sedgwick Opioid Settlement Strategic Plan allocates $15.5 million, with 39% earmarked for treatment expansion and 25% for integrated care through 2030 10. Together, that is nearly two-thirds of local settlement dollars flowing toward exactly the kind of infrastructure, treatment, ongoing care, connection between services, that alumni programs live inside. When local government is putting the majority of its opioid response money toward the same continuum you are considering, that is a signal about where the community thinks the fight is actually won.
None of this is a guarantee for you personally. Policy plans and state tier definitions do not keep anyone sober by themselves. What they do is confirm that when you show up to a monthly event or open the app on a hard Wednesday, you are not doing something optional or fringe. You are doing the piece of the continuum the state names, the county funds, and the evidence backs. Your job is smaller than the policy conversation. It is just to stay inside the part of the system built to hold you.
Month Three, Month Six, Year Two: What Staying Tethered Looks Like
Recovery does not fail on a schedule, but the pressure points are predictable enough to name.
Month three is where the novelty of being clean wears off and the ordinary starts to feel long. The people around you have stopped asking how you are doing. The daily structure of treatment is a memory. You are back at work, or looking for work, and nobody is clapping when you get through a Tuesday. This is the month when opening the app for a two-minute check-in matters more than it did in week one, because there is no one else marking the day.
Month six is where the risk shifts. You have proof you can do this. That is real, and you should let yourself feel it. It is also the month where confidence starts to whisper that maybe you do not need the events anymore, maybe you have graduated. That whisper is the part to watch. Sedgwick County recorded 190 overdose fatalities in 2024, roughly 48.4% higher than in 2015 8. The environment is not getting easier. Your response to it should not either.
Year two is where staying tethered stops being a project and becomes just how you live. You go to the event because your friends are there. You open the app because that is where the group text lives. The recovery language fades into the background, and what remains is a set of people who know your history without needing to hear it again. That is the outcome an alumni program is actually built for. Not a badge. A life that includes the community by default, on month 36 the same way it did on month three.
For Families and Veteran Peers Reading This
A quick note if you are not the person in recovery, but the one reading this on their behalf. A spouse. A parent. A brother who served with them. You are part of this too, and the alumni program knows that.
For families: the most useful thing you can do is stop being the only safety net. When you are the sole person tracking their mood, their meetings, their Tuesdays, you burn out, and they feel watched instead of supported. A working alumni community redistributes that weight. Peers with lived experience notice things you cannot, and they can say things you should not have to say 1. Your job gets to shrink back to being family.
For veteran peers: peer recovery support functions across settings, including veteran-heavy spaces where shared history matters as much as shared sobriety 3. If you are further along and reading this for someone you served with, showing up to a monthly event alongside them is not a favor. It is the specific mechanism SAMHSA describes as core to keeping people engaged in recovery 1. You already know how to have someone’s back. This is that, in a different uniform.
Both of you should know the app and events are not closed rooms. Ask about how family and veteran peers plug in. The community-first philosophy only works if the community is actually wide enough to include the people already standing next to the person in recovery.
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Frequently Asked Questions
What does the Holland Pathways alumni program actually include?
Two integrated pieces: a dedicated app you can open any day for check-ins, peer messaging, and staying connected between gatherings, and monthly in-person events that bring the alumni community into the same room. The design reflects what SAMHSA identifies as core peer recovery support: coaching, recovery groups, and community-building 4. You get both digital continuity and face-to-face relationships, not one or the other.
How soon after discharge should I join the alumni program?
Before you leave, if possible. The transition out of treatment is when peer connection matters most, and ongoing peer contact is exactly what reduces the likelihood of relapse 1. Ask your counselor to set you up with the app and the next event date while you are still on campus. Walking out already tethered to the community is different from trying to find your way back in three weeks later.
I don’t have a car. Can I still get to monthly alumni events in Wichita?
Yes, with a little planning. Wichita Transit runs routes anchored at the Downtown Transit Center, updated as of August 2025 11. Several run every 45 or 60 minutes, and Saturday service holds at 60-minute frequencies 12, so build in buffer time on both ends. You can also ask on the app whether anyone alumni is coming from your part of town. Shared rides are part of what the community does.
Does alumni support replace outpatient treatment or therapy?
No. Alumni support is peer recovery support, which is non-clinical assistance that helps sustain long-term recovery 3. It sits alongside clinical care, not in place of it. Kansas explicitly lists peer mentoring alongside outpatient treatment and case management as separate tiers of substance use disorder services 7. If your care plan includes outpatient, IOP, therapy, or medication management, keep those going. The alumni program surrounds that clinical work with community.
How can family members or veteran peers get involved?
Ask directly about how the alumni program includes people outside the person in recovery. Peer support is not limited to one setting or one role; it functions across recovery centers, residences, and veteran-heavy spaces where shared history matters 3. Families benefit from being one voice in a wider community rather than the sole safety net. Veteran peers can plug in as the specific kind of lived-experience support SAMHSA describes as core to sustained engagement 1.
What happens if I relapse after joining the alumni program?
You come back. That is the whole point of a community built on lived experience. Peer support exists precisely because people in recovery understand that setbacks happen and that staying engaged reduces the likelihood of the next one 1. Nobody in the alumni network is going to be shocked. What matters is that you open the app, come to the next event, and let people who have been there help you re-enter clinical care if you need it.
References
- Peer Support Workers for Those in Recovery. https://www.samhsa.gov/substance-use/recovery/peer-support-workers
- Recovery and Support. https://www.samhsa.gov/substance-use/recovery
- Peers Supporting Recovery from Substance Use Disorders. https://www.samhsa.gov/sites/default/files/programs_campaigns/brss_tacs/peers-supporting-recovery-substance-use-disorders-2017.pdf
- What Are Peer Recovery Support Services?. https://library.samhsa.gov/product/what-are-peer-recovery-support-services/sma09-4454
- Housing Supports Recovery and Well-Being: Definitions and Shared Values. https://library.samhsa.gov/sites/default/files/housing-supports-pep24-08-007.pdf
- Best Practices for Recovery Housing. https://library.samhsa.gov/product/best-practices-recovery-housing/pep23-10-00-002
- Substance Use Disorder Treatment Services. https://www.kdads.ks.gov/services-programs/behavioral-health/services-and-programs/substance-use-disorder-treatment-services
- regional forensic science center – Sedgwick County 2024 Pathology Division Annual Report. https://www.sedgwickcounty.org/media/70084/2024-pathology-annual-report.pdf
- Drug Overdose Deaths in Kansas by County 2020-2024. https://www.kdhe.ks.gov/DocumentCenter/View/55469/2020-2024-Map-of-Kansas-Overdose-Deaths-by-County-PDF
- Wichita-Sedgwick Opioid Settlement Strategic Plan. https://www.sedgwickcounty.org/media/71692/wichita-sedgwick-opioid-settlement-strategic-plan-presentation-final-21725_aod.pdf
- Bus System Map Aug25 – Wichita.gov. https://www.wichita.gov/DocumentCenter/View/23554/Wichita-Transit-System-Map-PDF
- How to Ride. https://www.wichita.gov/1502/How-to-Ride
- City Council Districts. https://www.wichita.gov/650/City-Council-Districts
