How We Intend to Live Together

Each Selkie House home is designed as a home first. Shared meals, quiet corners, a kitchen that gets used — the ordinary architecture of a life that feels steady.

Clear, mutually understood house agreements will set expectations for everyone, so that safety and respect are structural rather than aspirational.

Women living at Selkie House are encouraged to build relationships inside their home and across the wider Akron community — through work, volunteering, peer support, and friendship.

We are building relationships with local organizations now, so those connections are there for the women living in our homes.

Shared living asks something of everyone: contributing to the household, keeping commitments, and participating in the life of their home.

Accountability here is not a penalty system. It is how a group of people takes care of a shared home and of each other.

Selkie House is being developed as a supportive living environment, not a treatment program. We do not provide clinical treatment, detoxification, therapy, medical services, or addiction-treatment services.

Women who choose to work with outside providers, counselors, peer-support groups, or medical professionals will be supported in keeping those commitments.

Cooking, budgeting, scheduling, transportation, employment, paperwork — the practical skills that make independence sustainable rather than theoretical.

These are learned in the course of daily life together, not delivered as curriculum.

Selkie House is meant to be a chapter, not a destination. The intent is that each woman leaves with more stability, more confidence, and more of a network than she arrived with.

Planning for what comes next will begin early, not at the end.

We intend to help the women living at Selkie House connect with employment services, education, healthcare, transportation, and peer support available across Northeast Ohio.

Selkie House is not affiliated with any healthcare organization, and connection to a resource is never an endorsement of a particular course of care.