A longtime Oregon drug treatment center is shuttering as similar
programs for moms face trouble
[October 31, 2026]
By KAYLEE TORNAY/InvestigateWest
Room 219 at the Letty Owings Center in northeast Portland doesn’t look
like much more than a cramped dorm room, but it’s where Ashley Amorim
spent her first night with Jeremiah, the smiley, blue-eyed baby who she
said gave her the motivation to change her life.
Inside Oregon’s largest residential treatment center for pregnant and
parenting women, Amorim spent the past four months working to break what
she said was a 16-year cycle of using drugs. She took her medication
each day and wrote down goals and strategies to prevent relapse. She
processed grief and trauma with other moms and counselors. Child welfare
workers allowed four-month-old Jeremiah to spend two nights a week with
her, critical bonding time that most residential treatment programs
can’t accommodate.
For 37 years, the center has offered mothers with children up to age 5
one of their best shots at accessing treatment while avoiding separation
through foster care.
“It’s a great program,” Amorim, 36, said. “It saved my life, and I am
very grateful to have been a part of it.”
But Amorim was one of its last residents.
At the end of October, the center will close permanently, capping a year
in which Oregon has lost around 20% of its residential treatment beds
for pregnant and parenting people, InvestigateWest estimated. The losses
come as research shows opioid use during pregnancy has increased
substantially over the past decade, and substance use and mental health
are the leading causes of maternal deaths in Oregon during pregnancy
through the first year postpartum.
Fewer beds means fewer mothers will enter treatment, which will lead to
more families separated through foster care and more lives at risk, said
Diana Louise Smith, a certified nurse midwife and clinical lead for
Project Nurture, an outpatient program through a Portland hospital that
integrates substance use treatment and maternal health care.
“We’re probably going to see people die as a result of Letty closing.
Every week, people (are) giving birth to their kids and then not having
a place to go to treatment,” Smith said.
Letty’s closure reflects the broad challenges faced by centers serving
pregnant women with substance use disorders, including federal funding
cuts, aging infrastructure and rising costs to provide care as
increasingly potent drugs have made both mothers and babies sicker.
Leaders from three other programs serving pregnant and parenting people
said they have raised alarms with the Oregon Health Authority in recent
years. A spokesperson for Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek said the governor has
directed the health authority and the Oregon Department of Human
Services to create a cross-agency team to find solutions. Health
officials said it will kick off this month.
“This work is urgent, and the team will be partnering closely with
providers to identify practical recommendations that address immediate
risks, underlying systemic funding, and operational concerns,” wrote Kim
Lippert, a communications officer for the Oregon Health Authority, in an
email.
But Letty’s former residents, a dwindling crew of staff and community
partners said they are grieving and worried about what the loss of the
center’s 29 beds means for the growing number of people who need both
addiction care and parenting support. Central City Concern, the
nonprofit that ran Letty, is also closing Laura’s Place, a transitional
housing facility where about 16 women and their children lived each year
after finishing treatment at Letty.
“I just wonder, are we the canary in the coal mine?” said Tina Bialas,
director of the Letty Owings Center, who will be laid off at the end of
November. “I think we are.”
A growing need
When Lynn James-Kiona showed up at the Letty Owings Center in 1991, she
didn’t know what to expect from treatment. But after losing custody of
two children while she was deep in her addiction, she was willing to do
whatever it took to keep her new son.
That meant confronting the challenges of being both newly sober and
postpartum. Letty Owings and programs like it specialize in caring for
both mothers and children during those transitions. Staff hold babies to
let mothers get a few hours of sleep or bottle feed them when
breastfeeding is difficult. Women connect with their peers and learn new
skills through financial literacy, grief and parenting classes, while
their children receive care at in-house licensed child care centers.
James-Kiona said counselors helped her understand how intergenerational
trauma factored into her addiction, as a Black woman and a member of the
Yakama Nation whose mother had been cut off from her language and
culture after she was sent to boarding school. Separation from her own
children had left James-Kiona with familiar wounds and fears.
She recalled nights when she would try to fall asleep and wake up
feeling paralyzed, her body “reliving something my mind couldn’t
remember.” When she emerged from that state, a woman working the
graveyard shift would fold laundry and talk with her through the night.
Letty’s staff showed her and her son unconditional love, she said.
“I didn’t get that nowhere — not even from my own mom or my own
community. I was always judged, you know, about what I got and what I
don’t got, and they took me with nothing but the clothes on my back and
pregnant, and let me in,” James-Kiona said.
Thirty-five years later, James-Kiona is now a tribal elder and founder
of the Mary Kiona Foundation, a nonprofit named after her late ancestor
that focuses on community services and housing. More than a decade ago,
she reconciled with her children she lost custody of. Her son, who
stayed with her at Letty Owings, is now a real estate broker with five
children of his own.
“I don’t think people understand how healing a family is way bigger than
just getting clean,” James-Kiona said. “I don’t think people understand
what places like this could do, and how powerful children are. Now I’m
able to be there not only for my kids, but for my grandchildren, too.”
Central City Concern said thousands of mothers have come through the
Letty Owings Center since its founding in 1989. Over its nearly
four-decade existence, Oregon’s demand for substance use treatment has
only grown. The state’s rate of substance use disorders exceeds the
national rate, and its overdose death rate climbed for most of the past
two decades. Overdose deaths began to drop in 2024, but health officials
are uncertain how federal health care cuts might impact that trend.
Growing the state’s supply of residential treatment beds has been a
priority of Kotek’s administration since she took office in 2023. While
investments from the state legislature and health authority have helped
spur the creation of more than 200 new beds, with another 400 in
development, beds for pregnant people aren’t specifically tracked.
The state also doesn’t track prevalence of substance use disorders among
pregnant people. Dr. Andy Mendenhall, chief executive officer of Central
City Concern, cited an analysis by HealthShare of Oregon, a coordinated
care organization serving the majority of Portland-area Medicaid
enrollees, which estimated that around 550 pregnant people needed
treatment for psychosis, stimulant or opioid use disorders in 2024. Even
if only a quarter of those patients needed residential treatment, they
would likely exceed the entire state’s bed capacity for pregnant and
parenting people today. Capacity can fluctuate based on a facility’s
staffing and the needs of its clients, but InvestigateWest estimated
that roughly 120 of those beds remain, most located along the I-5
corridor.
Over the past decade, women have also been coming to facilities like
Letty with more serious health issues, program leaders said. Purer and
more potent methamphetamine has spurred more mental health crises and
psychosis. Fentanyl takes a long time to leave the body, so people need
more time in treatment and higher doses of methadone and buprenorphine.
“We’d see a lot of folks really struggling with sleep, struggling with
staying awake during the day, struggling with their mood, struggling
with unusual thoughts,” said Dr. Amanda Risser, chief medical officer
for Central City Concern.
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 Programs must also be equipped to
support women with health complications often linked to homelessness
or low access to prenatal care. Pregnant women with substance use
disorders are at increased risk for hemorrhage and preeclampsia.
Their babies are more likely to be born premature and underweight
and some experience neonatal abstinence syndrome. Letty Owings staff
transported women to and from medical appointments and to visit
their children in the neonatal intensive care unit.
Several programs for pregnant people and mothers
were created in response to rising use of heroin and crack cocaine
in the late 1980s and early ’90s. Northeast Portland was
particularly hard hit. Nancy Anderson, a Portland mother in
recovery, and Letty Owings, a longtime high school teacher in Lake
Oswego, co-founded their center because they saw firsthand that when
mothers couldn’t access treatment that accommodated their children,
it often meant they didn’t get treatment at all — which could be
deadly for both them and their children. Ecumenical Ministries of
Oregon ran the center until 1997, when Central City Concern took
over.
Funding for Letty Owings is a patchwork of Medicaid
billing, grants and contracts, and fundraising to fill gaps. The
community has long lent support and resources. Over the decades,
there were diaper drives and furniture donations. Bialas, Letty’s
director since 2021, recalled how churchgoers in West Linn and
Portland made quilts for women graduating from the home and bought
Christmas gifts for the children staying at Letty.
“Church grandmas and grandpas write out their $25 checks,” Bialas
said. Suddenly her face crumpled and tears spilled down her cheeks.
“It breaks my heart I have to tell them that we’re closing,” she
said.
Common burdens
Central City Concern leaders said they hit a breaking point with the
Letty Owings Center this summer, when they were confronted with a
growing deficit and the building’s need for expensive repairs. They
also hit dead ends trying to transfer management of the program to
another provider.
Mendenhall said they considered restructuring Letty’s operations
because of the growing needs of its clients. But that would increase
costs by $2 million each year, while Letty’s projected deficit in
2027 was already $1 million.
That, along with the updates needed to keep the building
operational, “made the juice not worth the squeeze,” he said. The
nonprofit’s 2025 revenues exceeded $200 million, but it is also
bracing for losses through cuts to Medicaid that are beginning to
take effect this year.
Even with extended timelines, no other provider had the capacity to
take over Letty, Mendenhall said. It “speaks to just the compression
and the strain” on the entire landscape of providers, he said.
Closures can happen without much warning. When a Portland women’s
residential treatment center run by Volunteers of America Oregon
announced a temporary pause in operations in April, its staff had to
scramble to find safe places for 47 clients staying there. Five
people who were pregnant or postpartum went to Letty Owings.
Volunteers of America Oregon then told staff the closure was
permanent on April 16.
Letty Owings stopped new admissions in July, just two months before
leaders announced it was closing, too.
InvestigateWest spoke to the heads of three other residential
treatment programs that either focus exclusively on pregnant and
parenting mothers, or reserve several beds for them within their
women’s center. Each one said existing funding streams don’t account
for the variety of costs involved with caring for both a mother and
young child impacted by substance use and trauma.
Centers often don’t have reliable ways to recoup the costs of
providing clothes, diapers and food, transportation to and from
appointments, or the skill-based classes that help parents satisfy
child welfare requirements to maintain or regain custody of their
children.
Then there are the costs to maintain buildings. Some programs
receive “room and board” reimbursements that pass through counties —
but Bialas and others said those funds only cover a fraction of the
real cost. More health complications have meant more prescriptions,
which means more staff needed to supervise while clients
self-administer doses of sometimes a dozen or more medications.
“There is an expectation: ‘Oh, this must be the most beautiful time
in your life, you had a new baby,’” said Eva Williams, executive
director of Willamette Family, which operates a residential program
that can accommodate 16 to 20 women, depending on how many have
children. The picture is more complicated when mothers are
simultaneously experiencing withdrawal, adjusting to new medications
and recovering from birth, she said. “All of that together requires
a substantial amount of care.”
Williams said her program is “suffering deeply” in the current
funding environment and that state officials have only recently
started paying attention. Francesca Barnett, senior program director
of Project Network, another Portland residential drug treatment
program focused on Black mothers, said it was “frustrating” that
health and child welfare officials launched their team to find
solutions only after the Volunteers of America Oregon and Letty
Owings closures.
“We needed that before they had to make that choice,” she said.
State leaders said they recognize the loss of beds is significant
and they intend to act.
“Keeping families together while parents receive care benefits the
whole family,” wrote Hanna Thomas, spokesperson for Kotek, in an
email. “The governor believes pregnant and parenting women and their
families deserve quality, holistic behavioral healthcare and she is
committed to working towards that reality in Oregon.”
State Rep. Rob Nosse, whose district includes the center, said he
planned to meet with Central City Concern to learn more, calling the
center a “badly needed” resource. State Sen. Lisa Reynolds, a
pediatrician who has focused on perinatal health and babies in her
work as a lawmaker, said she’s exploring whether legislation can
address those funding problems.
“I’m working with a group of providers specifically on … where we
can cut red tape, where we can change the bureaucracy,” she said,
adding that Letty’s closure has “changed the timeline.”
Last days of Letty
As Amorim prepared to leave the Letty Owings Center, the building
that once bustled with nearly 20 other moms and their kids was
already growing quieter and emptier. On Amorim’s moveout day on Oct.
8, she packed up her things in a mostly vacant hall.
Among her belongings was a baby swing for Jeremiah, a handmade quilt
and a custom sobriety coin shaped like a sunflower, with the words
love, hope, spirit and faith blooming at the center.
“It’s really sad to me that they’re closing and are not going to be
able to help any more women and children,” Amorim said. “What are we
going to do now? How are they going to get the help that they need?”
In one way, Letty’s closure helped Amorim, since she had to return
to the hospital several times for treatment for infections. The
pause on admissions allowed her to retain her spot in a program that
usually had more than 20 women on the waiting list.
After moving out of Letty to the Hillsboro clean and sober house
where she now lives, Amorim, Jeremiah and his father, Brian, who
also completed treatment this year, have gotten to spend their first
days together as a family of three. Child welfare is still involved,
but Amorim said she and Brian are so far on track to regain full
custody of their son.
She thinks Jeremiah would have had a very different future if not
for Letty.
“Seeing my son for the first time and holding him has made every
single thing worth it,” Amorim said. “Really, it has been
challenging, but at the same time, it’s been nothing but motivation
for me to just do better and to be better for him.”
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