CT recovery coaches help people live. Will federal cuts upend that?

On a rainy April morning, Kerry Bilda pulled up to his client Jack’s apartment in downtown Norwich to give him a ride to work.

Close to the street corners where tiny bags of fentanyl change hands, Jack locked his front door, jumped into Bilda’s car, and together they left the city behind: a beloved grinder shop, the imposing stone facade of the Catholic Church, skinny headstones on a hillside. Are any of Bilda’s former clients buried here, taken by an overdose epidemic that’s stalked this corner of Connecticut more viciously than virtually any other? 

Bilda is a recovery coach. He helps people enrolled in medication-assisted treatment in 11 cities and towns in eastern Connecticut to navigate sobriety and saw 107 clients last year. Bilda acts as a shield from the kinds of small but bedeviling snags — a needed ride, a glitched prescription — that can quickly unravel a delicate recovery. 

But to witness Bilda’s work is to see a still larger project in action: how scores of workers at clinics, nonprofits and state agencies help some of Connecticut’s most at-risk residents to stay not only sober, but also fed, safe, housed. It’s the nonlinear endeavor of helping people who may have never known stability to build stable futures. 

But that work’s future has been spun off-kilter in recent months by massive federal budget cuts to programs that serve the poor. Those cuts will soon impact everything from food security to access to health care.

Bilda’s position relies on a $140,000 annual grant from the Connecticut Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services, but the money comes from the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, an agency that’s currently being dismantled. Which raises the question: will Bilda’s job survive? And if not, will his clients?

Many lives

When they’re in the car together, Jack and Bilda chat about Jack’s schedule, an idea he has for a small business, his work fixing up apartments. At times, they look and sound like old high school buddies, reminiscing. 

Bilda is a native son of Norwich who has lived experience with addiction — in his case, long-ago struggles with alcoholism. At 6-foot-2, he’s most often speaking to someone below his eyeline, but his casual stance and restrained expression create a gentle, sturdy presence: he is here to help.

Jack, 41, asked that his last name not be used out of respect for his family’s privacy. He’s originally from East Haven. He has a soft, even voice, and when he talks about his struggles with addiction and the road out, he’s self-critical but unguarded, the story flowing unencumbered. Bilda chimes in when a moment he witnessed comes up. 

Like back in 2018, when Jack was using heroin.  

“I would go to these programs and detoxes and whatever, and as soon as the doors would open, I’d be using again,” Jack remembered. “It was kind of hopeless.”  

Jack had manic episodes and for years couldn’t find a medication that effectively managed them. 

In the throes of an episode, Jack felt grandiose — like he was right about everything — and like he could get anything done. “Who wants to be around someone like that?” he said. Though he didn’t swing to the opposite extreme of major depression, he sometimes felt pushed low by “the crap I got myself into.” That “crap” included a combination of larceny, drug possession and misdemeanors, according to his criminal record, landing him in prison and jail for a total of five years. 

Jack ended up in a New London shelter in 2018. It was there that he met Bilda through United Community & Family Services, the nonprofit health clinic where Bilda works.

Each morning, according to shelter rules, Jack had to be out of his bunk by 9 a.m. He couldn’t return to bed until 6 p.m. 

“It was just so easy to walk in circles and get in a trap, you know? Staying occupied was vital at that point,” Jack said.

Bilda had spent two decades working in behavioral health, but he was still new to the recovery coach position when he came by the shelter to pick Jack up. 

“Get me out of there for the day, get my mind off everything,” Jack remembered.  

“And we’d go hiking,” Bilda said. “Get a bite to eat, get coffees.”

On one outing, Jack and Bilda drove to Fort Shantok, sacred Mohegan land. They walked into the clean woods there, tree trunks like cathedral beams, light peeking through leaves overhead. On those trips, Bilda could offer Jack something more than a ride or a bag of groceries — he could give Jack the feeling of peace he’d always found in nature. 

One day at the shelter, police arrived and showed residents a photograph: they were trying to identify a man who had recently overdosed. Jack felt like he was in a movie, that eerie experience of recognizing the two-dimensional version of a friend whom he would never see in three dimensions again. And the final image of that friend’s life rattled him: “These two little kids were going to Sunday school one morning and found him” in front of a fast food joint. 

It was then that Jack really decided to stop using. He had made the decision before, but now he was determined.

‘There’s no way to delay that trouble coming every day’

Bilda drives a new company car, with a computer screen to connect him to online libraries of music and podcasts. But he favors the radio, and quotes the poetry he finds there. “It’s a fun job. It’s interesting. What’s that quote? ‘There’s no way to delay that trouble coming every day,’” a Frank Zappa lyric. “So you just deal with it, you figure it out. You figure it out the best you can, and you work with the person.” 

The line is from a Zappa song packed with images of a society in collapse, written in response to the Watts riots in Los Angeles: 

“...Don't you know that this could start
On any street in any town
In any state if any clown
Decides that now's the time to fight
For some ideal he thinks is right
And if a million more agree
There ain't no great society
As it applies to you and me
Our country isn't free…”

The trouble Bilda sees in eastern Connecticut every day crested just a few short years ago. It was then that the overdose death rate reached its apex: 42.3 per 100,000 people in the state, 57.6 per 100,000 in Connecticut’s southeast corner. 

Some of his clients were driven to use in a narrative heard across the U.S.: Patients were prescribed OxyContin for a workplace injury or bad back, the drug that was manufactured in Stamford and marketed as a nonaddictive pain killer. But then many found they were addicted when their prescriptions were unceremoniously cut off by doctors. People like Bilda’s client H.W., who was injured while working at Electric Boat, found that heroin filled the void. 

That crisis spurred a rise in overdose deaths, one that exploded when fentanyl infiltrated U.S. illegal drug markets in 2013, rapidly poisoning the supply. People who thought they were taking heroin or cocaine, or even pills like Adderall or Xanax, died of unintentional overdose when they took drugs laced with fentanyl, while people seeking out fentanyl often died of overdose too, because the concentration of the drug varied so widely. 

The most deadly year in Connecticut for overdoses was 2021, as it was in many states around the U.S., when the combination of fentanyl in the illegal drug market and the isolation of the COVID pandemic converged. 

But during the past three years, as the state has invested in recovery efforts, including the availability of the overdose reversal drug naloxone, the number of overdose deaths has been on the decline. In southeast Connecticut, a region hit especially hard by the crisis, the rate fell from 57.6 per 100,000 in 2021 to 37.8 per 100,000 people in 2024.

Rep. Cristin McCarthy-Vahey, D-Fairfield, co-chair of the Public Health Committee, said that such progress isn’t free. 

“It takes medication, which requires funding,” she said. “It requires recovery coaches. It takes infrastructure, people, buildings, staff, which requires funding. The things in place now are saving lives, but lacking those interventions, people will die.”

But there is more to living than survival. Recovery coaches like Bilda are part of a deeper effort to help people sustain their progress and rebuild their lives.

“We usually don’t see or recognize that somebody is struggling until they’re at the severe end of their addiction,” said Rebecca Allen, the director of recovery advocacy at the Connecticut Community for Addiction Recovery. But Allen said getting people beyond sobriety, to help them rebuild a life that may have been damaged by that addiction, requires more than just treatment. 

While Medicaid pays for medication-assisted treatment for recipients, recovery coaches are mainly funded by grants. There are dozens of state-funded recovery coaches across Connecticut, according to Luiza Barnat, opioid services director at DMHAS. Many are located in emergency departments within hospitals, others at health centers like the one where Bilda works in Norwich, sometimes going by other titles, like recovery support specialists. 

Some of the funding that supports recovery coaches, like the federally allocated State Opioid Response grant of $15 million per year, is approved through September 2027. Typically this grant is renewed on a two to three year cycle, and though state officials are hopeful it will be renewed again, that remains uncertain.

“People will struggle, people will suffer and some people will die,” McCarthy Vahey said of the prospect of such funding cuts. 

Medication-assisted treatment for opioid use disorder, the program in which Bilda’s clients are enrolled, has also come a long way. For decades, methadone was the only medication available to treat opioid use disorder, a treatment that has involved taking the drug daily at a specialized clinic. 

“That is an incredible burden for many people, and it also makes it very hard to hold down a job if you have to go to a clinic every day and stand in a line,” said Robert Heimer, a Yale professor of epidemiology and pharmacology.  

Regulations have relaxed, allowing people who have been faithfully using the drug to eventually be allowed to bring doses of methadone home instead of having to come in person to take the drug every day, Heimer said, and there is also another medication available — buprenorphine — which is an alternative to methadone and can be taken by injection or prescribed by a doctor. That’s the only medication Bilda’s clients use. 

Barnat says that while medication alone can keep people from returning to opioid use and overdosing, that’s not enough to truly “recover.”

“A lot of folks working on recovery have lost a lot of their connections to family and friends, and it can be really difficult to maintain recovery when you’re alone and isolated,” Barnat said. A recovery coach may serve as that figure, or just help someone as they find a different type of support — like a minister, a family member or a new career. 

‘Maybe I don’t look like a heroin addict, alcoholic anymore’

Once Jack decided to quit using, he went into detox. 

“The easiest thing was to go find a fix at that time, but I just remember sticking through it and being so ill, so sick,” he said. He enrolled in a medication-assisted treatment program at the health center where Bilda works. Then, Jack was able to move into a halfway house, where he lived for 18 months. He got a job at a ShopRite and worked his way up to manager of dairy and frozen foods. 

“It was a big thing for myself, because I hadn’t lasted anywhere, really. The trust and friendships I started to build … ” he said.

Before, Jack said he felt like he always had a reason close at hand to throw his sobriety away: “‘It’s a beautiful day out!’ Or, ‘it’s a horrible day out!’ And you’d always have an excuse to go use.” But he wasn’t using. He wasn’t throwing it away.

Then, COVID happened. During that time, Bilda learned that Jack had lost his job at ShopRite. Bilda never learned exactly what happened but he’d seen precarious moments like this one before, times when it would have been obvious for a client like Jack to start using again. Then, Jack was evicted. 

“Boof, there I am. I’m homeless.” 

It would have been so easy to use again, so obvious. 

Jack found a spot in the woods to camp where he wouldn’t bother anyone, and where no one was around to tempt him out of sobriety. Soon he found a job doing maintenance for the owner of some of the grand homes in Norwich that had been divided into apartments. He lived on instant ramen and cheap pizza. He used a gas-powered bike to get to work. And he had Bilda, whom he could call on rainy days when he couldn’t commute by bike.

It was May 2021 when Jack first started camping out. But when the weather got cold, Jack decided it was time to tell his boss his story.

“He’s very pure,” Jack said of his boss, awestruck at encountering a person who “doesn’t lie, he doesn’t cheat, he doesn’t steal. Period. He does not.” When his boss seemed genuinely shocked that Jack had once used drugs, it meant something to him. “I was like wait, maybe I don’t look like a heroin addict, alcoholic anymore.” It was a morale booster. 

By November, Jack had saved $1,700. He gave it all to his boss for the rent and first month’s deposit on a one-bedroom apartment, where he has lived ever since. The following spring, Bilda took Jack to Connecticut College in New London, where he’d been invited to pick up unwanted furniture after graduation. 

“It’s a rich college, so what happens is, the kids leave and they don’t take anything with them — they just leave. Lamps. TVs. Radios. Clothes. A whole bunch of jackets,” Bilda said. Bilda drove Jack down in the big van from work and told Jack, “Take whatever you want.”

Peaks and valleys 

Norwich has lived many lives: home of the Mohegan tribe; armory of American revolutionaries; hub of shipbuilding and textile mills. At the dawn of the 20th century, Norwich claimed more millionaires per capita than any other U.S. city — in fact, the apartments Jack works on are subdivided mansions in the city’s “Millionaires’ Triangle.” But when industry after industry departed, what was once Connecticut’s most densely populated city fell to its 10th. Today, the median income hovers at around $37,000 a year. 

Bilda has lived through tough stretches and hopeful moments in his city, like when the Mohegan Sun Casino opened in 1996, bringing jobs.

“This city’s like any other city,” Bilda said. “It’s got problems like any other city. Peaks and valleys, peaks and valleys is what I would say.”

U.S. Rep. Joe Courtney says that the district he represents has been gaining more economic momentum in recent years — in fact, it’s now the fastest growing labor market in the state, thanks in large part to jobs at General Dynamics Electric Boat. 

But the region was not spared the opioid crisis. Courtney said the devastation of the opioid epidemic is closely linked to the rural character of the region. Courtney worked to secure a grant in 2022 for two recovery coaches in the region. 

“The wonderful thing about the recovery coach model … is that these guys were able to sort of overcome that tyranny of distance in terms of just door-to-door service,” Courtney said, so the coach can bring preventative care to clients as opposed to waiting for them to show up in emergency departments. 

But Courtney says that the recent progress his area of the state has made — both in lowering overdose numbers and building economic stability — is threatened by the potentially devastating impact of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. 

Cuts to Medicaid, nutritional assistance and programs that support medication-assisted treatment and recovery efforts is “really a terrible convergence as far as this issue is concerned,” Courtney said. “To me, it’s proof of concept that shows when you have that concerted, persistent coverage for vulnerable populations that you can really make a difference.” 

Over the past few years, as opioid death numbers declined, Courtney had begun to feel more confident that efforts were working. 

“You sort of felt like we really have sustainability here, and now with the wave of cuts that are about to come, it is frightening. We really could be just going backwards and squandering structures that were put in place to address the problem.”

Small victories

Before becoming a recovery coach, Bilda spent 22 years working at the state Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services, and he learned the importance of maintaining boundaries. At 4:30 p.m., he turns off his work phone. Clients know the other numbers to call in the evening. The boundary serves Bilda, but it’s also a way of showing his clients that they can set their own limits with the people in their lives. 

“Recovery coaching is definitely the model of, ‘what does a healthy relationship look like?’” said Michelle Melendez, director of substance use at United Community & Family Services, the clinic where Bilda works. 

Bilda told Melendez about a tense moment when he told a man he was coaching that he wasn’t allowed to leave his things in the health center’s car. “I think many times with our clients, if someone gets upset, they’re all done and they don’t talk to them forever. And that’s not the real world,” Melendez said. Having a disagreement with Bilda and seeing that he’s still there for them on the other side can help a client learn to weather conflict in their other relationships, she said. 

When Melendez first started the medication-assisted treatment program at United Community & Family Services, she said she would only open the program if they had a staffed recovery coach, because there is only so much that a clinician can do within the four walls of a health center. 

“A recovery coach is really going to be able to figure out what a person is going to need, whether it be housing, employment, life skills,” Melendez said. “In order to sustain recovery, you need to have someone on your side to help you navigate all of that.” 

Above his desk, Bilda logs the past month’s activity on a Post-it: 92 trips, 1,975 miles. On a Tuesday in May, he signed out a few specimen cups from the health center, and grabbed bags of food from its pantry. Then he set off to collect urine samples from people enrolled in medication-assisted treatment programs.

At his first stop, Bilda learned that his client was in crisis. Though she was taking her medication, her adult daughter was using drugs, and they’d gotten into an argument. The client was worried about her grandson, who had been living with her, but who had gone across the state to temporarily stay with his dad. She confided in Bilda “because I’m comfortable enough to tell him.” She asked that her name not be used in this article, “for my grandson’s sake.” 

In the car, Bilda took notes on the meeting, information he’d share with the client’s team at the health center.

Another client had good news to report — her daughter had gotten into art school, and a friend had agreed to pay the costly tuition. The day could just as easily lead him into crisis as success. Throughout, he maintained an air of calm reserve. 

“We tend to celebrate the small victories,” Bilda said as he drove. “And then they tend to add up and add up and add up.” 

Invisible thread  

Today, Jack takes sublocade injections, a form of buprenorphine, for opioid addiction, and medications to manage his mania and ADHD. He’s been sober for seven years, since July 3, 2018. He loves his apartment, a place he can finally call home, even though it’s close to some of the most active drug corners in town. 

“You need to put your blinders on and don’t inquire for anything, because that will get you ripped down,” he said. It’s no mystery what would happen if he veered from his path: “If you play the tape through, it’s the same result every time.”

After a nine-year estrangement, he has a relationship with his mother again. They talk every day. “Beyond my wildest dreams, I didn’t think that relationship would be healed, or normal,” he said. 

Now, every few weeks, his mother drives an hour and a half to Norwich where they do laundry and she takes him out for a meal. “She spoils the shit out of me.” 

Jack has a good relationship with his boss, too. And then there’s Bilda, so enmeshed in Jack’s story that it’s easy to miss him. Like invisible thread, Bilda was there making sure Jack’s recovery held together: driving him to his medical appointments, picking up a urine sample from work so he wouldn’t have to take time off to come in person, sitting with him through a manic episode and then speaking to clinicians to make sure they adjusted his meds. Bilda might have been a good Samaritan, but his presence was no accident: he is an employee, placed here by a health center, funded by the state, which was given that funding by Congress, to help Jack see his recovery through.  

Bilda isn’t too far from retirement now, and said he’d like to work his way out of the job — if only he could help enough to outpace the need. “But unfortunately, I don’t see that happening in the future, because there’s more bad stuff hitting the streets,” he said.

Every month he attends a meeting at a soup kitchen with other advocates and volunteers and together they get updates on the opioid epidemic. They learn about new synthetic drugs, like carfentanil, N-pyrrolidino protonitazene. “I can’t even pronounce the names.” 

Seven years since they first met, Bilda has faded some from Jack’s life, as intended. But the combined forces of the medication, psychiatric care, counseling, and, when needed, Bilda’s support, mean that Jack is no longer in crisis. It doesn’t mean he no longer needs the help. Rather, the combination is working.