people aging in recovery deserve to age with dignity, support, and understanding — not isolation or risk.
My name is Gil, and I am the founder of Never Alone Home Care Services. I could not have started this venture without two good friends, Aisha and Larry B. Two medical professionals, both of whom believed in me and validated for me the need for this service. To them, I say thank you. Thank you for believing, and thank you for stepping up when others would not.
First, let me say that I am a person in long-term recovery, and one whose life experience, professional training, and decades of service helped shape the concept of this much-needed organization.
My early life was deeply affected by addiction. And like for so many, substance use led to some very serious consequences. Those years were marked by instability, loss, and harm — to society, to my family, and most of all to myself. I was trapped in the muck and mire of addiction for almost three decades.
Recovery changed the direction of my life.
After many failed attempts at becoming drug-free, it was in 1988 that I finally begin my recovery. While I will not advocate for one mode of substance abuse treatment over another, but I will say that for me, the solution that worked has been via the Twelve-Steps.
It may have been a late start, but at 34, I began to recover. Shortly thereafter, I was able to make restitution to my college, and my Bachelor’s degree was awarded. In those early years of my recovery, I was working at the Puerto Rican Association for Community Affairs, PRACA, a private foster care agency. This was during the twin epidemics of the crack baby crisis and AIDS. I was blessed with the ability to foresee a need and a way to fill it. At PRACA,. Here I was able to develop a special needs foster care unit wherein cocaine addicted babies and those born at risk of AIDS were cared for by a specially trained cadre of foster parents. This led to recognition by the Child Welfare League of America and to a full scholarship to Fordham University, where I earned an MSW.
After my experience at PRACA, I worked for one year at the New York City Housing Authority as the Chief of the Drug Elimination Program. From there, the trajectory of my life’s work has remained one of service.
For decades, I remained active in service-oriented work, Community development, working with individuals and families impacted by addiction, incarceration, immigration stress, trauma, and poverty. I have been fortunate to have founded and led multiple community-based initiatives focused on support, advocacy, and navigation. While treatment and clinical care are essential, and I welcome their service, that has never been my forte; community organizing has always been, and continues to be, my passion. I currently serve as Executive Director of Helping Immigrants Thrive, Inc., a nonprofit organization poised to provide non-legal immigration navigation and community support services.
And throughout my life, post-addiction, one theme has remained constant: service as responsibility, not as status.
Why Never Alone Home Care Services Was Created
As a person in long-term recovery who is now himself aging, I began to notice a troubling pattern among people in recovery that I’ve known for decades. Many, while blessed to be growing older, are not all doing so gracefully.
Some become frail.
Some become chronically ill.
Some begin to lose mobility.
Some begin to experience dementia
Some become homebound.
Some are living alone with one or more of these ailments.
And each of these challenges brings new risks.
What has become clear to me is that even after years — sometimes decades — of living in recovery, aging and illness can put that recovery lifestyle at a very real risk if the right supports are not in place.
Sadly, I have witnessed so many of my friends die, while others continue to struggle. Not because they lack the commitment to stay in recovery, but because their world has narrowed. For many of us aging in recovery, medical appointments seem to replace making meetings; fatigue has replaced routine; and isolation has replaced connection. For those lucky to still have them, family members and spouses became full-time caregivers and, over time, became overwhelmed. For others, aging in recovery has become a lonely life – no spouse, and no family. And in too many cases, relapse has followed. For people in recovery, relapse is not a simple setback — it is a matter of life and death. And that reality becomes even more critical as people age.
Never Alone Home Care Services was created to address this gap.
The organization is grounded in the understanding that staying clean and sober must come first — even when health declines, independence is lost, or daily life becomes more complicated to manage. It exists to provide recovery-aware, non-medical support delivered with dignity, boundaries, and respect by people who understand the stakes.
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- This work is personal.
- It is informed by experience.
- And it is driven by service.
Never Alone Home Care Services exists so that people who have rebuilt their lives do not lose what they worked so hard to achieve simply because they are aging in recovery, are ill, or in need of help.
At the core is our philosophy that “people aging in recovery deserve to age with dignity, support, and understanding — not isolation or risk. Never Alone Home Care Services exists precisely to make that possible.”