Chris Tucker wasn’t looking for recovery when he walked into the former Wellness Rx Pharmacy in Tannersville five years ago. He wasn’t sure what he was looking for, but he knew something in his life wasn’t working.
In 2021, Tucker moved to the mountaintop, leaving behind Jacksonville, Richmond, San Jose, and Brooklyn for a quiet dead-end road in the hamlet. The setting was beautiful, but the quiet was also isolating. After years marked by addiction, prison, and instability, Tucker was determined to build a different life. Yet even the basics of daily life—making a doctor’s appointment, doing laundry, opening a bank account—felt beyond him.
“I had never learned any type of basic living skills,” Tucker said, now 39. “Like opening a bank account. What’s that?”
In his mid-30s, Tucker was trying to build a life organized around fatherhood instead of survival. But the shift from chaos to routine was harder than he had imagined.
“You need more than that,” he said of relying solely on family. “Even as much as you want that to happen, I would say it’s almost impossible to do by yourself.”
Then he noticed a business card.
It was sitting near the counter at the pharmacy: Mountain Top Cares Coalition. Beneath the name were a few services, including one that caught his eye.
“Life coaching,” he recalled. “I’m like, man, that’s what I need.”
He called the number and was soon connected to Mary Ellen Hotlzman, 77, a Certified Recovery Peer Advocate, who met with him in an office above the pharmacy. She listened, he said, without judgment, and after a few meetings suggested he connect with another peer support specialist, Lawrence, someone closer to his age with lived experience in addiction and recovery.
That introduction changed everything.
Lawrence was different from a therapist or a case manager. He did not require a week of planning or a copay. Paid through Mountain Top Cares Coalition, Lawrence—who is in recovery—showed up when Tucker needed him and made himself available in the moments when support was actually needed, Tucker said.
When Tucker did not have a car, Lawrence drove him to appointments. When paperwork piled up, Lawrence helped him navigate it. When daily life felt overwhelming, Lawrence walked alongside him, literally, in town to decompress.
“If I’m walking, I call him and say, dude, I’m really stressing out, can we go take a walk? And we go take a walk,” Tucker said.
Sometimes, the support was even more basic, and more profound.
“When I’m telling him, ‘oh, my laundry, this and that,’ he’s like, well, look, I’ll show you how to do it,’” Tucker said. “Now, as embarrassing as it is to have at 30-something another man showing you how to do laundry, he didn’t make me feel weird or embarrassed.”
For Tucker, those small lessons—laundry, scheduling appointments, learning how to talk through conflict—became building blocks for something larger: stability, sobriety, and fatherhood.
“My dad was never, ever in my life,” he said. “So being a good dad is super important to me.”
Today, Tucker is nearing four years in recovery. He moved in with his partner and her child in a downstairs apartment in a house shared with her family. He later adopted the boy, and the couple would go on to have another son together. His wife runs a cleaning business, and Tucker, now focused on staying on the right path and raising their children, gets help from his family to cover his share of the rent so he can remain home. He stays home with his children, helps manage the rhythms of family life, and credits Mountain Top Cares Coalition with helping him build a life he once did not know how to imagine.
Tucker’s story is also, in many ways, the story of the Mountain Top Cares Coalition. Founded in 2017, after over 120 residents showed up to a forum, and later incorporated as a 501(c)(3), the organization grew from a grassroots response to the opioid crisis into a countywide recovery support nonprofit with three full-time staff members, an annual operating budget of about $350,000, and roughly 162 people served each year. Since its founding, the group has made about 800 connections with people seeking help, according to founder and board president Jonathan Gross. It offers non-clinical support that includes recovery coaching, family support, Narcan training, referrals, support groups, and help navigating treatment and public systems.
“We look for the wounded heart, something I’m sure we have all experienced in our lives, and touch that tender place with love, compassion, and understanding,” Gross said. “We’re soup to nuts. We exist to provide a safe harbor, a place to go when all else fails. Not a handout, but a hand up.”
Mountain Top Cares Coalition will hold its annual fundraiser on Friday, March 27, from 7 to 10 p.m. at Last Chance Antiques & Cheese Café in Tannersville, as it works to raise $100,000 in six months.
The nonprofit organization operates in a county where the need for recovery support services is acute, even as some recent indicators have improved. Between 2014 and 2024, Greene County’s average annual rate of overdose deaths involving opioids was 24 per 100,000, about 1.3 times the rate for New York state excluding New York City, according to Greene County Public Health. In 2024, Greene County ranked fourth among the state’s 57 upstate counties for overdose deaths involving opioids. County data also shows that while overdose events have declined sharply since a 2021 peak, the risk remains shaped by what officials describe as a toxic and changing drug supply. From 2020 to 2025, there were 70 overdose deaths in Greene County, with most involving people ages 30 to 49, and 90% occurring in private homes.
Behind stories like Tucker’s is a small, intergenerational team of recovery advocates who draw on lived experience, professional training, and deep ties to the mountaintop community.
Patrick Magee, 48, executive director and a Haines Falls native, said Mountaintop Cares fills a persistent gap in rural communities.
“We have certified recovery peer advocates who provide one-on-one recovery coaching,” Magee said. “We also do harm reduction work, including maintaining public-access Narcan boxes across the county stocked with Narcan, xylazine test strips and fentanyl test strips. We offer Narcan training, other workshops and training for the community, and a range of activities, including youth socials, candle-making, and hiking. We also run groups.”
The team also works with local businesses to help hire residents in recovery, a significant caseload for a small staff working to break stigma while helping people navigate the complexities of health care, housing and social services.
“Just because those numbers are going down doesn’t mean the need is decreasing,” Magee said, referring to overdose deaths. “The need definitely remains constant in terms of services and what people are looking for.”
Magee said the organization also tries to reduce stigma by creating events that welcome the broader community instead of labeling everything explicitly as recovery programming.
“We don’t really put the recovery label on it or any of those kind of things because we want community members, everybody, to be here,” he said. “If we can get other community members who are family or friends or just kind of allies in here to be a part of it, that reduces the stigma as well and just creates a better support system.”
Erin Garcia, 25, who lives in Mount Tremper, is a full-time Certified Recovery Peer Advocate. CRPAs draw from personal experience with substance use and professional training to provide non-clinical support services, helping people develop recovery plans, build coping skills and navigate everyday life.
“I think what I try to do most in my day-to-day work or week to week, whatever, is just offer any support that I can,” Garcia said. “It’s not really my place to tell anyone what they should or shouldn’t be doing. If you want to get sober or if you don’t want to get sober, if you want to drink less, use less, that is perfect. Whatever will help you feel like your best self or will help you find more stable housing or more stable jobs, that’s what’s most important.”
In a rural area like the mountaintop, Garcia said, that kind of support can be especially important.
“It could be really lonely up here for a lot of people, especially when you need access to a vehicle to get anywhere,” Garcia said. “People around substance use can be very secretive and they don’t want to share their experiences. So when people are going through those experiences, they feel like they’re the only person who understands that feeling.”
Mary Ellen Holtzman, 77, of East Durham, has served as a part-time Certified Recovery Peer Advocate for six years. She often works with individuals and families navigating addiction and recovery.
“Actually asking for help is 50% of the responsibility of an individual,” Holtzman said. “Because once they say, ‘I want to change,’ that’s where the work can be done.”
Holtzman said the work often extends beyond addiction itself.
“We usually look at health. Are you eating? Are you sleeping? Do you have a place to stay? Do you need help with mental health? Do you need help with your emotions? Do you need help with finances?” she said. “Once we find out what they need, we plug them into resources so that they can start using them.”
Stephanie Schleuderer, 46, associate executive director who lives in Kingston, said the organization’s approach centers on meeting people where they are.
“The services that we are able to provide are not mandated. They’re not clinical,” Schleuderer said. “So it’s basically a mutual understanding and having a conversation with somebody, meeting them where they are, understanding that it doesn’t have to be strictly abstinence, it just has to be goal setting, both short and long term, and being able to work with everyone, build that confidence and be able to give them the resources and the support that they need to help them in their recovery.”
For Gross, the organization’s impact extends beyond the individuals who walk through its doors.
“One of the things that Mountaintop Cares, these folks are doing, is trying to integrate, trying to make the community stronger,” Gross said. “By inviting those folks in, when they have a place to talk, you strengthen the whole community. That’s a byproduct.”
As Tucker knows firsthand, the work often begins with something small: a conversation, a ride, a walk, or even a business card on a pharmacy counter. Then it grows into something much larger: a life.
“When I first moved up here, it could go one way or the other,” Tucker said. “I don’t think that it would have gone this way had I not seen that card.”
Noah Eckstein is the editor-in-chief of The Overlook. Send correspondence to noah@theoverlooknews.com.