Visitors, volunteers and program graduates flocked to Kinzer Street on Thursday to see Recycling Grace Ministries’ new facility, the Ruth House. The building is finally ready to welcome women leaving addiction, after extensive renovations and pandemic delays.
It will become the new headquarters of Recycling Grace itself.
“This started out as a God idea, and then the people of the community came alongside that God idea,” said Recycling Grace CEO Sandy Mick Shockey in a thank-you speech to board members and attendees before cutting the ribbon on the house.
Recycling Grace provides housing, counseling and opportunities for women leaving addiction. The ministry began as a church plant in 2009 and built its first home on Apple Street in 2014. The adjacent properties of the Linda and Ruth houses were donated by late philanthropist Dave Wendel.
Renovations on both buildings were sustained by donations and volunteers.
“The community has rallied around this to help us. They see what we’re doing and they know that we’re doing it for the right reasons,” Mick Shockey said.
“It’s really ... about the community, because you could almost say this is what the community has done,” added her husband Brent Shockey, who also volunteers with the ministry.
Work began in 2020. Shockey estimated the pandemic added at least nine months to the construction, but he and his wife praised local contractors who worked with them. They helped make renovations more affordable, and volunteers worked rain or shine to tear walls and nails out, replace plumbing, install new windows and build a new porch.
The house’s first occupants will move in April 3. The building has eight bedrooms and 14 beds, bringing Recycling Grace’s full capacity up to 30. Each bed is topped with a handmade quilt from the First United Methodist Church quilting club. The downstairs features a full kitchen, and spacious living and dining rooms. It also includes offices and meeting rooms.
Women who come to the program stay for six months and receive counseling, classes and connections to other ministries, plus assistance with finding employment, transportation, and eventually independent housing.
“We’re not charging them anything, which is unusual, but they don’t have it (the money). And if they work minimum wage and then they pay us, they can’t save enough to get on their feet,” Mick Shockey said.
“It’s really difficult when you start out with nothing to get back up on your feet.”
As a nonprofit, Recycling Grace is used to operating on a shoestring, but a recent federal funding cut has complicated its finances. Their stipend of $4,000 per person, per stay, has been reduced to $2,000. Mick Shockey is confident Recycling Grace will continue to move forward with community support despite this.
“Poplar Bluff is a very generous community, and everyone has been affected by addiction in some way or another, and so it’s close to their heart,” she said.
She also believes God will continue providing for the ministry and its women because it was his idea.
“He’s the one that inspired this — it wasn’t my idea, it was God’s idea. To show God loves these ladies, to give them a safe place to get their lives straightened out, to turn around,” she explained.
Recycling Grace’s impact is visible in the life of Mitzi Moss, a program graduate who now works at the ministry herself. She recalled arriving at the program from drug court, after a lifetime of abuse and 25 years in addiction. She hated everyone, including herself, and “was fixing to go to prison for the rest of my life, or fixing to die.”
Two weeks after arriving, she prayed for salvation and gave her life over to Jesus. Today, she is sober, independent and restoring her relationships with her family and children.
“He is putting things back together that I never thought could be put back together. Recycling Grace changed my life and saved my life,” Moss said.
What made the program so remarkable for her and many other women?
“I think it’s Jesus, Jesus all the way around. Without Jesus, I don’t think it would be like it is,” she explained.
The Ruth House is named for the biblical Ruth, according to Mick Shockey, because Ruth refused to remain where she was. Mick Shockey hopes the women who come through will make the same decision.
Some graduates do return to old ways of life, and Mick Shockey said this is to be expected. However, there are many more women who move on to lives of faith and restoration.
“We can go into town here and run into somebody real easy that’s gone through the program — but if it was just one, the time that I put in is worth it,” she said.
More information about Recycling Grace as well as opportunities to donate and volunteer are available at rgwc.org.