Will County horse ranch to help with addiction recovery

By Editor | May 14, 2025 |

Erik Christenson, director of operation for Second Story Foundation, is using his contracting skills at the new ranch in Crete that will be home and workplace to men in early recovery from severe substance use disorder. Meanwhile, he still finds time to enjoy a visit with horses boarded there. (Photo by Catrina Rawson of FarmWeek)

Jim O’Connor, executive director of the Second Story Foundation and a certified alcohol and drug counselor, explains how a horse ranch can help people with alcohol and substance abuse on their path to sobriety and build a new life. (Photo by Catrina Rawson of FarmWeek)

By PHYLLIS COULTER
FarmWeek

An Illinois man who credits a good rehab program and working with horses for saving his life now helps others struggling with substance and alcohol addiction.
“In 2016, I came to the end of a road where my life was no longer sustainable in any way, due to severe alcoholism,” Jim O’Connor said. “And you know, by the grace of God and some unbelievably loving people, I got the help I needed.”
Help began with a 28-day inpatient program and then led to a Palos Park horse farm, where “I was digging out literally and metaphorically.”
Today, O’Connor serves as executive director of the Second Story Foundation, which supports men in early recovery by providing stability, purpose and a path forward.
“If you’ve lived a life of severe substance use disorder for any length of time, it’s not always but it’s likely, that you kind of find yourself in financial ruin, so we founded the Second Story Foundation to solve that problem,” he said of the focus on providing housing and employment.
The foundation asked O’Connor to lead a program like the one that helped him. He agreed on one condition: “Find me a horse farm.”
Second Story Foundation did just that.
The foundation bought a scenic, 68-acre working horse farm in Crete, a village of about 8,400 in Will County.
Plans are to build a lodge for future residents to live and work on the farm, with a program patterned after a recovery center where both O’Connor and Erik Christenson, director of operations, found firm footing and purpose to restore their lives.
Christenson calls it “amazing” what working on a farm can do for healing. He’s seen it with “hundreds of guys” over the years.
“It saved my life,” said O’Connor, who after his long-term recovery experience, became a certified alcohol and drug counselor.
The Second Chance Foundation operates a similar program in Cook County, but there are no horses there. Two years ago, it bought a house in Alsip and “remodeled it with almost all volunteers in the recovery community,” said O’Connor, who is part of that effort. Four men at a time live there rent-free, to establish long-term sobriety, work at good-paying jobs off-site, and in one year move to their own places.
Getting your name on a lease is a “really big deal.” O’Connor calls it a life marker. “And so many people who suffer from severe substance use disorder miss a lot of life markers,” he said.
Likewise, at the Crete farm, while there is plenty of farmwork for residents who live there, when they get ready, they will get an off-farm job and eventually move into their own places. There is no deadline of a year to leave here; residents can stay as long as it takes, he said.
Arranging further funding and construction plans are underway, with the hopes that next year the first residents will move into a 7,000-square-foot lodge with a 2,000-square-foot community center and a commercial kitchen that also serves as a food pantry. It will be home for 15 men early in their recovery who and need housing, work and time.
“We have a site that’ll never run out of work,” he said. The ranch in Crete is in a “wonderful setting where people will be useful on day one, where they have jobs on day one, and where they can work in a healing environment with people who are compassionate to their needs.”
Along with the harness racing horses boarded and trained here, the ranch inherited four to six rescued horses. In recent years, the Illinois harness racing industry has suffered with the closing of prominent tracks like Arlington Park.
O’Connor said they hope to also be a positive factor in the recovery of horses and harness racing, in addition to helping their human residents with the first steps toward their new stories.
One thing O’Connor said he has learned from his experience is, “Things don’t get easier; we get stronger.”
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