After a difficult year for fundraising opportunities, the operator of Hope Sweet Hope Studios seeks to continue its mission that provides a two-year, faith-based residential program as a sanctuary for women recovering from alcoholism and drug addiction in the community.

“Funding is very low (now),” said Carmen Clavin, program director.

Speaking engagements in churches, which help provide substantial funding for the program, have largely been impossible since the start of the pandemic.

Steve and Carol Pederson, donors to the program since its inception in 2013, felt called to donate even more this year by providing the matching grant.

“I feel really strongly about the work they’re doing and the success they’re having,” said Steve Pederson. “My wife and I dug deep.”

In 2020 alone, five women have graduated from the program.

“This program has blessed me with endless opportunities and has been a gift of a lifetime,” said graduate Lillie Weir, 21, who celebrated two years sober this year. “I look forward to the next chapter in my life and will forever cherish this life-changing experience.”

One of the grant’s funders knows how life changing sobriety can be. After a family intervention in 1989, the business owner found an “immensely better” life that made it possible for him to provide the matching gift.

Since finding sobriety, Steve Pederson said his primary purpose in life is to stay sober and help others get sober, too. After years in the beer distribution business, the small business owner switched to bottled water distribution in 1999, as beer wholesalers started consolidating more.

He has confidence in the faith-based approach to sobriety that Gateway to Discovery provides, similar to how he achieved sobriety — by acknowledging a higher power — saying the approach is the best foundation to recovery.

“My recovery is based on growing, understanding and acceptance of that higher power and its grace and gentleness,” Steve Pederson said.

That’s an approach not often achieved through one- to three-month recovery programs that are often eligible for wider public funding and grant opportunities, he said.

“In (short-term programs), most minds are not open enough and clear enough to arrive at a point where we can hear that appropriately,” he said. “Our disease’s perception continues to tell us that we’re just not the kind of people that are going to get God in our life, or that God is punishing us.”

Three Gateway to Discovery graduates featured by The Messenger in 2020 cited the faith-based approach as instrumental to their success. Some had been through multiple attempts at sobriety before the private Fort Dodge program.

Sober since 1989, Steve Pederson said it took years for him to accept the idea of a loving God. In the 1990s, he went from thinking of himself as a “bad guy trying to be good to a good guy who (realized he) made bad mistakes.”

Donations must be received by the end of the year for the matching grant. Clavin said that donations are always appreciated to cover the costs of operational expenses. Supply donations for cleaning, women’s hygiene, toiletries and household necessities like toilet paper are appreciated, too.

“Our biggest household expense is toilet paper,” she said — a supply strained during the pandemic. “But really, it is our yearly operations that we’re challenged with right now.”

The program also provides food for women entering the program as they await their approval for food stamps to help with groceries, which can take four to six weeks.