Pam Pickett

Recovery Home Manager, the Salvation Army, Chicago

Every year, some of the men at the Salvation Army’s recovery home in Chicago go on an ISP retreat. Pam Pickett is there when they come back.

This story is drawn from a July 2026 conversation with ISP and keeps her words, lightly edited for length and clarity.

Why they say yes

I’m the Recovery Home Manager at the Salvation Army in Chicago. ISP’s is one of the programs at our treatment center. Our recovery home is 30 men. They come to us after treatment; some are recently off the street. They live free of charge and have group therapy, peer support specialists, twelve-step programs. Different avenues to help them heal. We’re only a four-month program, so every year we ask who wants to go on an ISP retreat, and eight to 10 men volunteer to go.

Why do they say yes? They want to do something different, to get out in nature; they never get a chance to really do that. And they hear from the guys who went before. A couple of the men who went on the retreat work here now. So they got proof, they got evidence of how good this is.

On retreat, they feel cared for

Here’s what happens out there. A lot of these men, nobody cared. Nobody sat down and listened to them. The retreat allows them to listen and to share. Even the food. They talk about how good the food is, how they’re able to eat as much as they can, nobody telling them, you can’t get this, you can’t eat that. It makes them feel such a part of life. They’ve been so separated from a regular life. They’re not used to being cared for. They’re not used to being loved.

They come back talking about the animals they saw out there, and how everyone treated them like they belonged. They didn’t feel like outsiders anymore. And in doing that, they felt like: my life is purposeful. There is meaning to my life. They get to choose. “I could choose to get better. I could choose to share what happened to me, my trauma. I feel respected.” The retreat shows them they can share from a place of brokenness instead of always healing.

Coming back a different person

There was one man who had never trusted anybody. He never wanted to open up. He never talked. When he came back from the retreat, you could see his whole countenance had changed. He lit up. He said he had never felt cared for the way he was at that retreat. He didn’t know that there was a loving God that loved him. He said that retreat opened up his heart again. He was crying as he said it. I always remember that, because it was so hard to reach him. He came back a different person. Today he’s back in school. He’s back with his children, after being estranged from them for about 15 years. He’s staying sober. And he comes back; he wants to help. That’s what the retreat gave him.

It’s not just him. Everyone that goes to the retreat says basically the same thing, in their own individual way. I see it doing a lot of good. In my time here, I haven’t heard one bad thing about the retreat, except that it’s too short.

What a retreat adds to treatment

People ask what a retreat adds to everything else the men already have: the group therapy, the mental health services, the twelve-step meetings. All of them is therapy: the physical, the mental, the emotional, and the spiritual. You need all of those things to become a whole person. They kind of intertwine with each other. And the retreat helps the men come back here and participate more. It’s like the sun. All the planets revolve around the sun. I think everybody should revolve around ISP, because they get the energy from there that helps them come back — to AA, to NA, to us.

What I tell people about ISP: it’s saving lives. It’s changing people’s trajectories of thinking, that they’re nothing, to something. It’s intangible. It works from the inside out instead of the outside in.

And all you gotta do is show up and get some healing.

Pam Pickett, the Salvation Army, Chicago