The Business of Hope

by Julie Catalano

Julie Wisdom-Wild recognizes every woman who comes in for treatment at Alpha Home, even if she’s never seen her before.

That’s because she sees herself in “these fragile, tender souls” who find their way to the 44-year-old non-profit chemical dependency treatment center serving low-income women, where Wisdom-Wild has been the CEO for the past seven years.

At 40, after a five-year battle with drugs and booze, Wisdom-Wild found herself at rock bottom: a middle-aged, 90-pound cocaine addict whose life was in a shambles. She had even been administratively discharged from the state hospital, “which means I was kicked out for not following the rules,” she adds. Nearly hopeless, she remembered hearing about Alpha Home. She stopped by for a 12-step meeting, and it changed her life.

“I was so moved by hearing the stories the other women were telling, and how far down their addiction had taken them,” Wisdom-Wild recalls, describing her own addiction as “a horrible, dark time” when the destructive secrets and lies of substance abuse “ruined every area of my life.” The first of many 12-step meetings at Alpha Home (she was never a residential client) showed her she was “no different from anybody else. It happened to me, too. This place could give me hope.”

Wisdom-Wild is now in the business of hope full time. She became Alpha Home’s CEO (replacing the leader of that first fateful 12-step meeting) after a series of twists and turns worthy of a movie-of-the-week. Throw in divine intervention, as she puts it, that put the right people in her path, and you have a glowing, vivacious leading lady who’s been clean and sober for 23 years. During that time she has graduated from college (“with honors! I’m proud of that”), become a licensed chemical dependency counselor and worked in treatment programs from S.A. to Del Rio to Seguin and back again. Today she manages Alpha Home’s 45 employees and $2.5 million budget.

It hasn’t been easy. Apart from staying in recovery—“It’s still one day at a time,” she says—Wisdom-Wild faced an enormous challenge in taking over Alpha Home’s reins.

“It was incredibly overwhelming,” she says. “When the former CEO pulled out of the driveway after two weeks of training me, I was so scared I got sick to my stomach.” She quickly regrouped, and started evaluating what was working and what wasn’t. “We brought in some new energy, and spent a lot of time on board development. We had work to do and we got after it.”

At the 30,000-square-foot Ruble Center across from Trinity Baptist Church, where Alpha Home was founded in 1966, there are GED classes, alcohol and drug education, and 12-step support for up to 47 women in the residential program and 80 in the outpatient program. There’s also a pregnancy and post-partum intervention program for 270 high-risk women a year.

Rehab in the real world, says Wisdom-Wild, is not like rehab you see on TV. At least, not here.

“Alpha Home is about much more than getting off alcohol and drugs. If that’s all they want to do, there are other programs for that. We hope to help a woman transform and restore her life.”

Part of that involves a spiritual component, but at a level of involvement that’s left entirely up to the client. “We’ve had Christian, Muslim, Jewish, no faith, some faith, and everything in between. We try to get people interested in a relationship with the God of their understanding.” Her favorite days, she says, are the twice-monthly “commencement” ceremonies for those completing the program. “They worked hard for that day.”

As did this 63-year-old mother of two and grandmother of three, who has come the longest way possible and is still going, discovering things about herself she could have never imagined in those long-ago years of despair.

“I love being sober. I love working with people. I loved going to school. So I just kept going through doors as they opened.” She watches clients stream in and out of the reception area, navigating new lives of their own.

“I can relate to them,” she says. “They can see hope in me and others like me. I want them to say, ‘If Julie can do it, I can too.’”