An Iowa nonprofit is building an $18.5 million addiction and mental health treatment center in Des Moines because the federal government never showed up for the fentanyl crisis. Polk County supervisors unanimously approved a $1 million grant on Sept. 22 to help Fort Dodge-based Community & Family Resources, Inc. expand the Grays Woods Recovery Center — money pulled from opioid settlement funds that only exist because pharma companies were sued into paying for the damage they caused.
The 74-bed facility will offer detox, residential care, psychiatric services, medication-assisted treatment, and outpatient support on a single campus. It's projected to serve about 1,000 people per year when it opens next July, according to organization officials. That's a drop in the bucket for a state where, as Executive Director Michelle De La Riva told supervisors, one in six people is diagnosed with a substance use disorder each year and only 25% to 30% actually get care.
"And at every handoff, there's a risk for someone to fall through the cracks," De La Riva said. "Gray's Woods is designed to change that. One campus. One door. One solution."
Follow the money. The total price tag is $18.5 million. Community & Family Resources is chipping in $5 million of its own. Donors have kicked in $9.5 million. Polk County's opioid settlement fund is covering $1 million. That leaves roughly $3 million unaccounted for in public reporting. The Des Moines Register noted the county grant and donor contributions but did not break down who those donors are or what strings, if any, attach to their giving.
Polk County Board chair Matt McCoy said at a news conference that Iowans have had to leave the state for treatment. "We've had a need for people to leave our state to go seek recovery in other places, and this is going to give the option to stay right here around their family, around their friends."
The center will have 24 residential beds for men, 22 for women, 16 for adolescents, and 12 medically monitored detox beds. Adults typically stay four to six weeks; adolescents, three to six months. It follows the 2024 opening of the Polk County Life Services Center, which handles alcohol disorders and mental health issues to divert people from emergency rooms and jails. Patients there can be referred to Grays Woods.
So here's the picture: a private nonprofit is doing what multiple layers of government failed to do for decades, funded partly by settlement money extracted from the pharmaceutical industry after the fact and partly by donors whose identities aren't disclosed. Meanwhile, the Portland Press Herald — the other outlet covering this beat — had nothing to say about addiction or mental health at all, running an opinion piece about gear libraries for kayakers instead.
The fentanyl crisis keeps killing Americans, and the permanent Washington class keeps writing checks for everything except the thing that might actually help. When treatment finally arrives, it comes from a nonprofit scraping together donor cash and settlement pennies — not from the agencies that were supposed to be on the job.
