By Dan Spalding
News Now Warsaw
WARSAW — Crane your neck from the corner of 301 N. Lake St., in Warsaw, and you can see the entrance of Kosciusko County’s Jail to the south.
That alone was a drawing card for LITE Recovery’s executive director, Tammy Cotton, when she started dreaming of finding a new satellite office in Warsaw that would be a little more spacious and still just a stone’s throw from the Kosciusko County Justice Building.
LITE had had an office for the past year on Center Street in Warsaw that happened to be rent-free, but the space was too small, Cotton said.
As it turns out, Cotton called the owner of the property on Lake Street, who said they did indeed have space available.
Everything fell into place.
“It’s really important to us because a lot of the people we serve are coming out of the county jail, and we wanted an easy access point to come and find us,” Cotton told a crowd of supporters who gathered Thursday for a ribbon-cutting to celebrate the Milford-based group’s new location.
“Living in Transition Effectively” began five years ago by assisting inmates in Kosciusko County with essential needs for re-entry, such as getting IDs, finding housing — and for many — staying sober.
And while the organization has taken root and expanded since it started some five years ago, Cotton said she thinks the proximity to the jail will help.
Programs inside the jail already assist in helping inmates ensure as good a transition as can be expected. But not everyone heeds the available advice.
“The idea is that there is a warm handoff directly from jail right to LITE. We make sure that we have somewhat of a plan in place, but there are people who fall through the cracks because maybe they didn’t choose to talk to somebody while they were in jail, and they just get out,” Cotton said.
“They are the people we’re really targeting,” she said.
Cotton said they hope to establish regular office hours eventually and that it’s big enough to accommodate group meetings in the future.
“We have four of our peer coaches who live in Warsaw, so it’s an easy place to land here to meet clients,” she said.
LITE is also working on a new promotional video that will be available on the laptops of Kosciusko County inmates who use the devices for various purposes.
She said it will be available soon and that it will be another good way to promote their services.
She thinks it will help generate more traffic for LITE.
“I mentioned in the video that we have this office right here, accessible to them, so I hope we see an uptick,” she said.
