March marked three years since Paula Jolly opened Amanda’s House, a long-term, sober living home for women and their children in Green Bay. 

Within four days of the opening of the home she named to memorialize her daughter, its six bedrooms were full. For the last year and a half, 40 or more people have sat on a wait list, Jolly said. 

“It’s hard because a lot of times, they don’t have anywhere else to go,” Jolly said. “There’s other female sober living and male sober living (homes) in town but still not enough. They all have wait lists.” 

Jolly, who grew up in Niagara, Wisconsin, has called Green Bay home since the 1990s. She has two degrees from Northeast Wisconsin Technical College, where she studied medical office management and human services and substance use counseling. Jolly said she “could have gone to be a substance abuse counselor but I decided this was my path because I can help more people this way.”

The structure Jolly has built within Amanda’s House allowed her to escape what she described as rigid confines of typical counseling, where the state determines the terms of client services. She also made Amanda’s House a place where people could stay as long as they needed. While some may stay for just a couple of weeks, others have stayed for about two years. 

Staff at Amanda’s House provides them with life skills training, mental health support, substance use support and connections to community resources.

While working at another sober living home in Green Bay, Jolly saw the need for this type of program firsthand. She watched as women left treatment prematurely to reunite with their kids — only to fall back into their previous harmful cycles. 

“We’re trying to break the cycle,” she said.

Laurie Doxtator, 60, grew up west of Green Bay on the Oneida Reservation and returned to Wisconsin after living in California, where she said she used practically every drug you could think of and attempted suicide at one point. She said she began drinking alcohol at age 8 and experienced trauma over the decades, including the deaths of two of her children and a miscarriage. 

“But then I learned, you have a life and you have better things going for you,” Doxtator said. 

After 50 years of drinking, “it ain’t giving me nothing in life. It ain’t gonna bring my children back, it ain’t gonna bring my mom back,” she said. 

Doxtator previously spent four months in a 30-day rehabilitation program but knew she needed more structure and more time to learn how to heal. 

She has lived at Amanda’s House for more than two years.

After more than a year and a half of sobriety, aided by support from other women in the program and classes that help her heal, Doxtator said she feels safe there. “Me moving out from here into society, it’s scary for me,” Doxtator said. “I have to journey on one day but I have support here and support all over.” 

Jolly has told Doxtator: “You can stay here until the wheels fall off.”

Jolly believes such assurance would have helped her daughter.

Amanda Marcouiller was 13 months into recovery when she died in 2020 at age 37. She spent part of her final week at her mother’s house, where Jolly could tell something was wrong. 

“You’re acting like you did before, can I help you?” Jolly recalled asking her daughter, referring to Marcouiller’s previous period using substances. Marcouiller replied that she simply had a migraine. “So the last time I saw her was when she was probably under the influence, and I just couldn’t prove it or do anything about it,” Jolly recalled. 

Many people in the region and state face similar challenges. United Way of Wisconsin’s 211 helpline in the past year has fielded more requests from Brown County residents for housing and shelter and mental health and addiction resources than any other broad categories.

Before lightly declining in 2023, drug overdose deaths in Wisconsin increased each year since 2016, according to the Wisconsin Department of Health Services. 

Marcouiller helped Jolly launch the Mandolin Foundation, the nonprofit organization operating Amanda’s House, just a month before she died. “I wasn’t gonna continue on,” Jolly said. “But I felt like she would have wanted me to.”

The next step for Jolly and her small staff at Amanda’s House: fundraise for a renovation to add five bedrooms. Jolly secured federal funds in January that give her a good start on that expansion. 

“There’s a lot of states that are way ahead of us in recovery and substance use disorder type recovery, like eons,” Jolly said. “We have a lot of catching up to do.”

Honoring her daughter, Amanda’s House founder seeks to break addiction’s cycle in Green Bay is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.