Akeela House

Akeela, Inc is one of Alaska’s oldest and most diverse Behavioral Health programs, incorporated in 1974. We provide prevention services in 18 communities throughout the State, and outpatient and residential substance use treatment for community populations in Anchorage and Ketchikan. Akeela also provides prison-based substance use programs in multiple correctional institutions throughout the state. We offer a wide range of outpatient mental health services, as well. Mental health services for adults and families are provided in Anchorage, and a full-range of mental health services: general mental health for adults and youth, emergency psychological services, services for adults with severe/chronic mental illness and for children experiencing severe emotion disturbances are provided in Ketchikan. We also provide transitional housing for mentally ill adults in Ketchikan and for recovering substance users in Anchorage. We serve clients from across Alaska with an emphasis on those living in the Southcentral and Southeast regions. In both of these areas, outpatient services are provided to community members but residential clients travel from all over the state, joining local clients receiving services. Akeela also serves offenders incarcerated in prisons throughout the State. We serve men and women in co-ed settings in Ketchikan and Anchorage, women and their children in Anchorage, and, while men are served in most of the prison settings, one program serves incarcerated women. Our mission supports these clients, the locations, and societal standards from whence they come.As a private nonprofit, we are supported through grants, contracts, Medicaid, private insurance, donations, and self-pay. Additionally, as a State grantee we provide care to the uninsured and indigent.Akeela prides itself on providing one of the stronger continuum of care programs in Alaska. We begin our continuum with well-regarded prevention programs located throughout the state in areas as isolated as Gambell and Savoonga on St. Lawrence Island, just east of Russia, to Nome and Kotzebue in the far Northwest, Unalaska on a Southwest Aleutian island, Anchorage, the Kenai Peninsula, and Ketchikan in the far Southeastern Panhandle of Alaska. In our Anchorage substance use programs, Akeela provides services across the spectrum to those individuals needing the lowest level of treatment through those requiring the most intense, residential treatment. Additionally, women are provided gender specific treatment and in our women’s programs, service is offered to the whole family. In recognition of the growing number of clients who experience co-occurring disorders now being served in our substance use programs, we offer mental health services in Anchorage. In our Ketchikan program, the ratio is reversed. We serve the whole range of mental health problems, while providing smaller substance use programs that serve clients needing the lowest level of treatment up to intense residential service. Our prison-based substance use programs provide an intensive out-patient level of care except for the women’s program that offers a more rigorous, longer-term residential style treatment. Regardless of location, all of our substance use clients are provided aftercare services. In recognition that many clients coming out of substance use treatment have little in the way of resources, we provide transitional housing for them in Anchorage, and we offer transitional housing for severely mentally ill clients in Ketchikan. If our services do not adequately meet the needs of the clients we serve, we have established a broad range of agreements through which we are able to refer clients for additional services.