The Story

Eighteen thousand years ago, massive floods surged across the Pacific Northwest — water held behind a mile-thick glacier finally released, filling the Willamette Valley in days and forming a temporary inland sea. Inside those floods were icebergs carrying rocks from Montana and Idaho: stones that had no business being in Oregon soil. When the ice melted, they were left behind in strange and striking places. Geologists call them erratics.

Like stones bearing deep striations, scars carved by the pressure of ice and grit, we carry the markings of our own travels as evidence of the strength it took to arrive.

But this is a human story. The ancestors of the Kalapuya and Molala witnessed these waves. The Yakama and Umatilla peoples carry the power of these floods in their spoken histories today. These shared stories, passed through generations, remind us that humanity has always survived the storm. Just as the floods deposited the fertile soil that makes Oregon green, our shared histories create the ground where new growth begins.

We are Oregon Erratics. Staff, administrators, counselors, doctors: peers and equals, all of us, from all walks of life. Broken by the journey and polished by the waves. Showing up in unexpected places to help. Our stories prove that you can be moved, scarred, and changed, and still land as a striking, beautiful part of the landscape.

Beauty out of cataclysm.

What We Do

Oregon Erratics is a physician-led Medical Stewardship Organization. We exist to solve a specific, stubborn problem: peer-led recovery programs in Oregon do transformative work, and most of it goes unfunded, not because it isn't valuable, but because accessing Medicaid reimbursement requires clinical infrastructure that community-based organizations weren't built to carry.

We carry it instead.

Our work sits at the back end, the credentialing, the clinical oversight, the billing architecture, the regulatory navigation, so that peer specialists, Traditional Health Workers, and community organizations can stay exactly where they belong: in relationship, doing the work that only they can do.

We work with

• Community-based organizations seeking sustainable OHP reimbursement for peer support services

• Traditional Health Workers and peer specialists operating under Oregon Health Plan billing codes

• Coordinated Care Organizations navigating Medical Stewardship arrangements

• Organizations seeking ASAM Criteria training and addiction medicine consultation

If you're trying to build something durable in Oregon's peer recovery landscape and the system keeps getting in the way, we should talk.

Mission & Values

Oregon Erratics was formed in 2025 to establish peer-led resources as a standard of care in addiction treatment. We help organizations build sustainable funding to grow recovery capital, not as a hierarchical partner, but as an adjacent one. We hold the infrastructure so the front line can breathe.

We acknowledge that culture and tradition are treatment. Emulating the robust, thriving peer-based models of recovery among many contemporary Indigenous communities, we are committed to supporting egalitarian, culturally competent treatment as a path to recovery for all people.

Recovery happens in community. We gather what Margaret Wheatley calls the “islands of sanity:” places where people can be fully human together. When we all show up for each other in that work, we can protect our community of recovery from the structural violence that has been directed at people seeking recovery.

“Compassion is not a relationship between the healer and the wounded. It's a relationship between equals. Only when we know our own darkness well can we be present with the darkness of others. Compassion becomes real when we recognize our shared humanity.”

— Pema Chödrön,
The Places That Scare You

“When we recognize our common ground, the roles of ‘caregiver’ and ‘patient’ dissolve, leaving only the simple, profound presence of one human being with another. In the end, there is no helper and no helped. There are just two people who have come together to learn.”

— Frank Ostaseski,
The Five Invitations

Land Acknowledgment & Tribal Commitment

We acknowledge that the land now known as Oregon is the ancestral heartland of many indigenous nations who have been its stewards since time immemorial. We honor the nine federally recognized tribes of Oregon: the Burns Paiute Tribe, the Confederated Tribes of the Coos, Lower Umpqua and Siuslaw Indians, the Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde Community of Oregon, the Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians, the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation, the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs, the Coquille Indian Tribe, the Cow Creek Band of Umpqua Tribe of Indians, and the Klamath Tribes.

Indigenous communities are disproportionately impacted by substance use disorders, yet they also possess the most enduring models of community-led, peer-supported healing. Oregon Erratics is deeply committed to supporting the work of tribe-affiliated organizations and tribal members. We aspire to stand humbly as partners to those who serve these populations, seeking to learn from and amplify community and wisdom as the vital standards for treatment and recovery.