Highlights of Oxford House Development
| 1975 | Oxford House founded in Silver Spring, Maryland by Paul Molloy. |
| 1976 | Four additional Oxford Houses including two in the District of Columbia. |
| 1987 | Review of first ten years of Oxford Houses shows over 80% of residents stayed clean and sober. |
| 1988 | Congress passes legislation to encourage states to help start recovery houses based on Oxford House concept throughout the country. |
| 1989 | Oxford House expansion begins with 16 houses in the D.C. area and 2 in Pennsylvania. A central office is opened to establish a movement by training outreach workers to help start new houses nationally. New houses started in Missouri, Vermont, & South Carolina. |
| 1990 | New houses in Texas, Virginia, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Washington, Oregon, Hawaii, Ohio, Delaware, and Massachusetts. |
| 1991 | CBS 60 Minutes favorably features Oxford House. Expansion continues with more than 300 houses by years end. 1993 502 Oxford Houses in 37 states. Oxford House sets goal of 1,000 houses by the year 2002. |
| 1998 | Over 700 houses and growing! Legislation in Congress to provide $50 million towards Oxford House development. |
| 2013 | Currently 1,610 houses nationally and internationally! |
Funding
The principle of Oxford House replication remains the same since the second Oxford House was created around a nucleus of two members of the first House who were willing to relocate "down the street" - experience is the teacher. The teachers must now be sent hundreds or thousands of miles from home, and they must have the resources to remain with individual Houses and Chapters until the living experience of 20+ years is successfully passed on.
Funding received by Oxford House, Inc. is used for the general purposes described below:
- Direct labor and labor overhead.
- Travel expenses including lodging and per diem for staff personnel away from home base.
- Other expenses including telephone, printing and postage.
- Expenses related to assuring protection of legal rights under the Federal Fair Housing Act Amendments of 1988.
- General and administrative expenses to provide the staff necessary in support of Field personnel, audit requirements, data collection, etc.
Passing these costs on to the individuals who use Oxford House would place Oxford House out of the financial reach of most of the people who need it. Oxford House must seek the support of individuals, the community and the state in order to ensure that the tradition of affordable housing to its mostly homeless constituency is maintained. Individual Oxford Houses are self-supporting. Recovering individuals pay the cost of housing and rehabilitative support themselves, and the grantor in the community contributes only to the initial cost of creating that self-supporting network and ensuring the quality control.
In such a partnership, recovering substance abusers and the communities in which they live bring into existence a tool which prevents relapse in 80% of its members. As the number of relapses drop, the cost of incarceration and homelessness drop; the number of children born with "crack syndrome" drops; the number of drug related crimes drops. The cost to society of drug and alcohol addiction can be measured both in dollars and in human misery. The funding of Oxford House, Inc. is an investment towards reducing that cost.