For Founder and CEO Amee Gray, RecoverWell isn’t just a company. It’s personal.
“In a lot of ways, RecoverWell is sort of a love letter to my dad,” Gray says. “I lost my dad to addiction and mental health. And even though I worked in healthcare for a long time, I really wasn’t able to help him.”
It wasn’t for lack of knowledge or effort. The system meant to help families like hers was, as Gray describes it, a logistical nightmare to navigate, even for someone who understood healthcare from the inside. “I had a lot of great contacts, I knew an awful lot about insurance and understood care plans,” she says. “But when it came to helping my own dad find resources, I was in the middle of a crisis. I was not thinking clearly, and I was not handling things well.”
That’s the layer people often miss, says Gray. It’s not just that the system is hard to navigate — it’s that the people trying to navigate it are also often grieving, frightened, or in crisis themselves. If she struggled that much with all her prior knowledge, how could anyone be expected to do better? That’s why RecoverWell exists: to take as much of the burden off families who are already carrying enough, giving them space to focus on their loved one instead of a maze of paperwork and phone calls.
RecoverWell is a platform dedicated to streamlining access to treatment, recovery, and healthcare services for patients navigating addiction, mental health challenges, and the many barriers that come with being unhoused or under-resourced. It was also designed to support care workers. “The job of a social worker in the hospital is just so…it’s just so challenging,” Gray explains. “It’s unbelievable that they are ever able to get things done.” RecoverWell exists to fill that gap, both for the social worker coordinating care and for the patient on the other end of that phone call waiting to find out what’s next.
Gray credits her mother for setting the example for RecoverWell. A social worker during the HIV and cocaine epidemics of the 1980s, Gray remembers her mother poring over the phone book searching for resources for people. “This was even before Excel,” Gray recalls, sharing that her mother built handwritten charts of services, providers, and resources, all in service of one guiding principle: “The best gift I can give to the patients I work with is hope and options.” Today, that same instinct — matching people to the right resources quickly, and with dignity — happens with the click of a button.
RecoverWell takes the guesswork out of finding trustworthy providers who can meet a patient’s needs, putting hospital-approved treatment options at patients’ fingertips. Every provider in the RecoverWell network undergoes a thorough vetting process to ensure quality care, and every patient who enters the system is paired with a Care Manager to ensure they’re connected with the right services, fast.
Gray describes one moment that captures why this work matters so much to her. A patient she was helping had a couple of treatment options and asked what the next step was to apply. “I said, ‘oh no, you’ve already applied and have been approved. Now it’s just up to you to pick which one you want’,” Gray recalls. “This gentleman cried. He said, ‘no one in my life has ever said to me, you have agency and choice, that you get to choose where you go.'” For Gray, that moment crystallized everything: “Seeing someone have joy because they have options, I was like, okay, let’s keep going!”
RecoverWell has since helped more than 4,000 patients access addiction treatment alone, in addition to the many others it connects to broader health and social services. But growth brings its own challenges, and Gray is candid about what it takes to keep an organization like RecoverWell sustainable. Some days that means jumping on a call with a patient in crisis. Other days it means fundraising, meeting with investors, training new community health workers, or mentoring interns pursuing their master’s degrees in social work and public health. “I feel like we have a part in launching a new generation of social workers,” she says of the internship program RecoverWell has built, one that gradually introduces students to direct patient work because, as Gray puts it, the work itself demands so much: “It’s labor intensive, and it’s brain intensive, and it’s heart intensive.”
It’s in this balancing act, pairing mission-driven work with the very real operational demands of running a growing organization, that Heluna Health has become an essential partner. “When I came across Heluna Health, I was like, this is exactly the kind of support that I need,” Gray says, “because they are specifically working to create access for people and to make sure that people get whole person care.”
What’s surprised her most is the level of individualized support. “One of the things I’ve noticed in working with Heluna Health is that I get a lot of individual attention, certainly more than I had expected.” She meets regularly with her Contracts and Grants Manager, Kimberly Morones, who Gray describes as an invaluable thought partner, not just on grant applications, but on strategy. “How can I tweak my data to be more attractive to potential grantors, or to be a more impactful company?” Working alongside Heluna Health, Gray says she’s learned to think differently about funding altogether: “Grants are not just, here’s some money, let’s see where it sticks. The money is best utilized when you have something very specific.”
Beyond grants strategy, Gray points to the behind-the-scenes operational support — human resources, accounts payable, and all the administrative infrastructure that goes into running an organization — as some of the most valuable support RecoverWell receives. “There’s a lot of things Heluna Health takes off my plate as a new entrepreneur,” she says. “I could have never imagined how much they prop up my business… It’s been a night and day change for me.”
Ask Gray what keeps her going through the long hours and the inevitable rejections that come with running a mission-driven organization, and her answer isn’t about revenue or growth. It’s about her daughter, and the legacy she hopes to leave behind. When her mother passed away, Gray recalls being met at the funeral by person after person who told her how her mother had changed their lives. “It wasn’t because I felt like, oh, my mom’s so popular,” Gray says. “It was legitimately that my mom had done something that improved their lives.” That’s the legacy Gray hopes to build for her own daughter to witness. “The legacy isn’t how much money you leave behind or how many houses you own,” she says. “The legacy is how did you leave the world a better place by being in it.”
For Amee Gray, RecoverWell is that legacy in motion, one patient, one option, one moment of hope at a time.
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