SAFE HARBOR OPENS ITS CLUB HOUSE TOMORROW
The Bar Harbor Story is generously sponsored by Thrive Juice Bar & Kitchen.
SOUTHWEST HARBOR—Safe Harbor Alano Club Board President Steve Cotreau sometimes tears up a bit when he looks at the new floors upstairs at the American Legion Hall that now host the club and its community center.
These floors? They shine. They’re new. They’re gymnasium grade. But there’s something special about their story, too. The floors were in rough shape from decades of use, dancing feet, tables moved across the planks. They’d supported a lot. When his organization bought the building, they knew they’d have to fix the floors and had budgeted $10,000 to do it. Floors are the foundation of things. They matter.
“The guy came down and laser measured everything. He asked me what we wanted,” Cotreau said.
The floors needed to be sanded and refinished with a gymnasium finish.
“There’s going to be a lot of people, a lot of traffic. It needed to be very durable,” Cotreau said.
The quote came back at $14,000.
“I said, ‘We just met as a board and allocated $10,000 so I’m going to have to pass.’ He said, ‘This means a lot.’ He said, ‘I have personal history and he said I’m going to donate the $4,000 and he did it for $10,000.”
He opened his arms wide, embracing the room, the floor, the space, the kindness. “Look at it.”
The floor shines beneath new white tables, each adorned with floors, and waits for more feet, more stories to support, more meetings and dancing and laughter.
Thanks to the Safe Harbor Alano Club Board’s efforts, businesses like that flooring company, supporters, and individual acts of kindness and thought, planning and intelligence, there’s a new place to hang out on Mount Desert Island on Thursdays, Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays. And this place? It’s a safe haven, a community center, a place where the people who go there are meant to be empowered and supported and valued.
The Safe Harbor Alano Club is about belonging, making connections, building a life and having fun doing it.
“No stigma.
“No questions asked.
“No boxes to tick,” its website reads.
The message is on the wall that hangs from one of the upstairs walls as well. That message is important to the club members.
The Safe Harbor Alano Club is about community and for people in recovery. It’s a dedicated place for people who are in long-term sobriety, a place with help and support and resources.
“MDI’s recovery community has longed for a ‘clubhouse’ of its own,” reads a fundraising letter from its board.
It’s the only place on MDI that nurtures long-term sobriety with resources, camaraderie, and activities for people recovering, their family, and their friends.
“The number one barrier to treatment is stigma,” Cotreau said. “Being publicly out there” helps deal with the stigma, he said.
“For me, personally, it’s a similar thing to being gay,” he said. “You think life is basically going to end if I stop doing drugs and alcohol. You don’t know that anything is out there because people don’t talk about it and people typically aren’t sort of out there as examples in the community saying, ‘I don’t drink and do drugs and life is pretty darn good.’”
Even on the website, the board members and pieces of their stories are out there.
That’s important.
“I’m in recovery myself. I belong to a 12-step group and we had a meeting at the old school house in town and then COVID happened. Everything shut down. About a year into it we needed to start meeting in person again,” Cotreau said.
Being in the room and having a personal connection is important for people in recovery. Because of COVID, the group couldn’t meet at the school house. One of the members reached out to the Legion about using its hall.
“Instantly, it was a better fit.”
The school room was kind of small and it didn’t have a kitchen. The Legion Hall has room and cooking facilities.
“We start to have once a month breakfast celebrations to celebrate the milestones for people in recover because of the kitchen,” he said. “It was a better fit. When it came here, it became co-ed. It became bigger.”
The group used to average 12 people at a meeting. At the Legion Hall, it averages 20 and 80 people for the monthly meetings.
A Legion member said in passing that the membership was dwindling and that they should buy it. To sustain it, they started forming a nonprofit in 2023. It took approximately a year for that, then they raised the money to purchase the building and do some renovations.
“It doesn’t depend on one person. It belongs to the group. We wanted it to be a legacy. We wanted it to be sustainable. We wanted it to be here forever,” Cotreau said.
He stressed how important it is to have a substance-free and safe place to hang out, how it can make so much difference.
“I got sober in Chicago 35 years ago. It was an incredible place to be an alcoholic. It was an amazing place to be in recovery. It’s a huge community. One of the first Alano Clubs is in Chicago,” Cotreau said.
There was a club there called the New Town Alano Club, and it was an openly gay club in the 1990s.
“If it weren’t for that club, I would not be sober,” Cotreau said. “I think it’s hard for people who don’t have lived experience to understand that when you get sober, you’re like a newborn. I didn’t know how to talk to people. I couldn’t have complete thoughts in my head. I didn’t know what to do other than work. My whole world has been drinking.”
“I had no idea even where to find the path until I found the Alano club,” he said.
He’d do anything, empty ashtrays, sweep floors, just to hang out there.
“Being amongst people was very anxiety producing for me because I didn’t know how to converse, You know, everything was awkward to me. I remember standing against the wall and a guy comes up to me and he says, ‘I get it. It gets better,’” Cotreau said.
It did.
“People in recovery are like that,” he said of the man’s kindness to him that day. “That’s what this is about. It’s about those of us who have been around having that hand. It’s really also for people in long-term recovery. I don’t really enjoy going to bars. I don’t really enjoy going to events where there’s a lot of alcohol. So, coming here is just—ah—it’s just comfort.”
“The opposite of addiction is connection,” Johann Hari wrote.
That sentence is the first thing visitors see when they go to the Safe Harbor Alano Club (SHAC) website, and SHAC members hope that connection will be what members and visitors feel as they hang out at the new Safe Harbor Club in Southwest Harbor, tucked into town proper in the building that was owned by the Legion Hall.
The club bought that building in February though the Legion still gets to use it. Cotreau keeps finding bits of the Legion as they renovate. A capacity sign hangs on the door. There was a bucket of “dance dust.”
Before that, the club went through all the hoops to become a nonprofit.
Since the purchase, club members have been renovating and adding in a pool table, foosball, shuffleboard. Safe Harbor also hopes to raise $1 million to keep the building going and improve it more.
They’ve already done some renovations—like the floor—and now they are ready to host an open house in the club house.
They hope to have a fundraiser in the fall at the club to help with its renovations, which include private study spaces and more accessible bathrooms.
They are focusing on donations because of worries about the data collection that can come with state and federal money. Some people want to remain anonymous when they come hang out or even when they give. The board understands that and wants to protect that safety.
It’s all volunteers. There are no paid staff. The building is owned by its members and operated by its members. The cost of membership is $5 a month or $50 a year. The connections you might make? They are priceless.
The pool table was for sale locally and a board member bought it. Other people are volunteering to run karaoke. A shuffle ball table was brought down from the Millinocket area. A board member drew out the future designs for the space. Those are posted on the wall upstairs right by those shiny, sturdy floors.
“I am one tiny spoke on a big wheel,” Cotreau said of all the work, all the care, and all the love that went into the project.
The board includes Emily Graham, Geoff Wood, Sara Jones, Scott D. Farley III, Greg Sewell, Bar Harbor and Mount Desert Police Chief David Kerns, Julie DiNapoli, Robert Worrell, and Dr. Charles Hendricks.
“There are incredible people,” Cotreau said of the board and the members of the club. “It’s mind boggling that any of this happened. It was just a thought less than two years ago to this….It’s incredible!”
The open house is Saturday, July 19. It begins at 4. On future Saturdays there will be open mic nights, karaoke nights. You can bring a snack to go along with the coffee and tea.
“The Mission of the Safe Harbor Alano Club is to support people in addiction recovery, whether directly or indirectly, by providing meeting space, social activities and education,” the website reads.
Safe Harbor Alano Club is located at 22 Village Green Way. For more information visit www.safeharboralanoclub.org.
Unless otherwise specified photos: Carrie Jones.
EVENTS THIS WEEK (MANY REPEAT EVERY WEEK)
Thursday, July 17, today
5:30 p.m. Beginner's AA meeting 5:30 p.m. to 6:30 p.m.,
7 p.m. AA meeting 7 p.m. to 8 p.m.
Friday, July 18
4 p.m. SHAC Club Open 4 p.m. to 9 p.m.,
Saturday, July 19
4 p.m. SHAC Club Open 4 p.m. to 9 p.m.
Sunday, July 20
11 a.m. SHAC Club Open 11 a.m. to 4 p.m.,
7 p.m. Alanon Meeting 7 p.m. to 8 p.m., Alanon Meeting
Thursday, July 24
5:30 p.m. Beginner's AA meeting 5:30 p.m. to 6:30 p.m.
7 p.m. AA meeting 7 p.m. to 8 p.m.
Friday, July 25
4 p.m. SHAC Club Open 4 p.m. to 9 p.m.
Saturday, July 26
4 p.m. SHAC Club Open 4 p.m. to 9 p.m.
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