Jessica Vega

In the fall of 2025, Jessica was one of the fifty people staying at the OpenDoors shelter on Cumberland Street in Woonsocket. She was 44, homeless for the first time in her life, and in constant pain from a surgery that had damaged her bladder and pelvis. Every day she walked to the store with her walker and bought liquor, and every day she finished it before she got back.

In January, a case manager told her about She Thrives, an OpenDoors program that pairs housing and recovery support with GLP-1 medication, a class of drugs that research suggests can also quiet cravings for alcohol. Jessica did not believe it. “I thought, this girl is crazy,” she says. “I thought they were lying to me.” She took the first injection anyway. That day was the last day she drank.

“It was like a miracle,” she says. “It was like they changed my head.” She is careful about how much credit she gives the medication: “It does 90 percent. I have to put the other 10 percent.”

Jessica has since moved out of the shelter and into an apartment with her daughter. Her children, who had stopped speaking to her, now call and visit. Her story was featured on PBS NewsHour and in a short documentary about the She Thrives GLP-1 program.

“If they don’t try, how are they going to know it’s going to work?” she says. “This medication is going to change a lot of lives, for sure.”