2025 IMPACT REPORT

Saving Lives.
Building Community.
Centered in Recovery.

Forty-nine years in, and just getting started.

We Have Always Done This

Six words, adopted in 2025, that distill forty-nine years of work. The statement didn't change what we do. It gave us the clearest language we've ever had to say it.

The people who come to us often arrive in genuine crisis: dual diagnoses, untreated medical conditions, no stable housing, and lacking community support. Our clinical team conducts safety planning every single month with clients who are on the edge. We are built for that. Many of our staff have walked this path themselves. This is not expertise learned from a textbook.

Stepping Stone team behind their banner at the San Diego Pride parade — Stepping Stone flaggers getting ready for San Diego Pride 2025

88

residential graduates

78

outpatient completions

166

people completed treatment in 2025

142

people in residential programs

63

people in sober living

100%

of clients who were homeless on arrival were housed at discharge

85%

referred to employment and education opportunities

Stepping Out, our outpatient program

The First Door

Stepping Out delivers rapid, trauma-informed, LGBTQ+-affirming care for people facing a substance use disorder. For many, our outpatient program is the first door they walk through, and the last step in our program on their journey to recovery.

Services

SUD Counseling
Individual & Couples Therapy
Clinical group therapy
Case Management
Relapse Prevention

1 in 11

outpatient clients now identify as transgender or non-binary.

up from 1 in 20 in 2024

Gender Identity

Male 83%

Transgender or non-binary 11%

Female 6%

Race / Ethnicity

White 38%

Hispanic 35%

Mixed / Other 15%

African American 10%

Asian / Pacific Islander 2%

Substance of Choice

Methamphetamine 69%

Cocaine and other substances 13%

Alcohol 12%

Opioid 6%

Figures reflect outpatient (Stepping Out) clients served in 2025.

Finding the Words

Behind the new mission was a year of quieter work: deciding how Stepping Stone talks about recovery, and about the people who come to us for it. In 2025 we built a messaging playbook, a shared voice for everything we publish, so that whether you meet us in a newsletter, a flyer, or a phone call, you meet the same organization.

Recovery at the center. Housing, mental health, and outpatient care all flow from recovery. So that is where our language starts, every time.
Community, not charity. We don't talk about rescuing anyone. We talk about a community that takes care of its own, because that is what happens here.
People, not cases. We retired language that treated clients as problems to manage. The people who come to us are building a life, and we describe them that way.

We put it to work right away.

The signs that it is landing are small and real. Staff reach for the same words. Clients see themselves in how we describe the work. Partners repeat our language back to us. Getting the words right is not a marketing exercise. It is how more people find their way to a door that was always open to them.

The Stepping Stone community gathered in front of the Stepping Out outpatient center — Recovery, built on community · San Diego

Taking Care of Our Own

Recovery at Stepping Stone doesn't end at the door. The people who complete our programs come back. They run groups. They sponsor the person who walked in last week, scared and unsure. Our alumni are not a nice story we tell at the end. They are the cornerstone of how this works.

An active alumni organization keeps people connected long after their last session, and a dedicated family group brings former clients back to give the next person what someone once gave them. That is the whole model in one sentence: a community that takes care of its own.

And it is not all solemn. There are parties. There are kikis. There are sober celebrations that prove the thing we tell every client on day one, that recovery is not the end of a good life but the start of one. Joy is part of the work here.

When donors and elected officials visit, something shifts. They come with talking points and leave having seen, up close, what LGBTQ+ recovery actually looks like. We have watched minds open and hearts follow. Showing the people who shape policy exactly who is on the other side of it is community work too.

When our community members recover, they return to their families, their jobs, their dreams. The ripple effects of one person's recovery strengthen all of us.