For 40 years, Pride Institute, an addiction treatment program for the LGBTQ+ community, stood as a pillar of support for queer people working to break free from substance use. It was one of only a small number of LGBTQ+-specific residential recovery programs in the U.S., attracting patients not only from Minnesota but across the nation.
Then in late December 2025, Universal Health Services (UHS), the Pennsylvania-based for-profit provider that acquired Pride in 2010, announced that it would close Pride’s residential recovery services and transfer them to a UHS-owned facility in Palm Springs, Calif. Pride’s Minneapolis campus would shift to providing intensive outpatient services for LGBTQ+ clients while its Eden Prairie campus would offer intensive outpatient services for any adult, regardless of their gender identity or sexual orientation.
This announcement came as a blow to the state’s LGBTQ+ recovery community, many of whom felt that the existence of a residential treatment program focused on their needs underscored Minnesota’s reputation as a state supportive of LGBTQ+ rights. And while local providers are working to fill the gap, leaders in the recovery community are questioning the motivation for changes to Pride’s programs and voicing concern about ongoing support amid political uncertainty.
Kat Rohn, the executive director of OutFront Minnesota, said that even when other residential recovery programs welcome LGBTQ+ clients, the value of a program like Pride can hardly be overstated – especially amid recent closures of other LGBTQ+-focused health care providers, like Rainbow Health.
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“It’s important to have staff and spaces that are supportive and welcoming on the front end,” Rohn said. “You want to know you will be respected when you are already in a place of great vulnerability.”
Racing to fill the gap
Pride’s residential treatment closure has precipitated announcements of plans from other local addiction recovery programs to help fill the gaps in service.
EOSIS, a statewide provider of addiction recovery services, runs Latitudes, a St. Paul-based residential program designed to meet the substance abuse and mental health needs of the LGBTQ+ community. Prior to Pride’s shift, Latitudes operated at a 20-bed maximum capacity, but CEO Lew Zeidner said that the program recently doubled its capacity to 40 beds in response.
Zeider said that Latitudes is now Minnesota’s only LGBTQ+ -focused residential addiction treatment program, adding that its building is large and easily expandable. “We can go higher if need be,” he said.
In 2019, Hazelden Betty Ford opened an LGBTQ+-focused intensive outpatient addiction treatment program at its St. Paul campus. Four years later, staffing shortages led to its closure, said John Engebreth, executive director of outpatient programs for St. Paul, Hudson and Chicago. But now, Engebreth said, Hazelden Betty Ford is in the process of restarting the program.
“The Pride closure sped that process up,” he said, adding that they hope to launch it in the next few months. ”I’m very excited to have that option in our suite of services again.”
Wendy Jones, executive director of Minnesota Alliance of Recovery Community Organizations (MARCO), said that since Pride announced its closure, she and her colleagues, in partnership with Sonder — a peer-led, peer-run virtual recovery community — have been working to plan a community forum with local political leaders and activists.
“If anything, people need to have some kind of hope that this isn’t going away and we’re listening,” Jones said.
Carla Ferrucci, Sonder’s co-founder, said her members want to make it clear to the LGBTQ+ community that they are committed to supporting queer-focused recovery in Minnesota. “It is going to take all of us now to patchwork services until we can get more up and running,” she said.
“There’s this feeling of defeat in the community.”
Jones said that she and her fellow organizers originally planned to hold the town hall in late January at the Minneapolis LGBTQ+ gathering space Queermunity, but upheaval created by the federal government’s Operation Metro Surge and the killing of Renee Good forced them to push the date back. It is not scheduled for June 4, during Pride Month.
“People are distracted in a million different ways and everything is under attack right now,” Jones said. “There’s this feeling of defeat in the community.”
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News of Pride’s program shifts couldn’t have come at a worse time, said Zeidner, CEO of EOSIS. Amid threats to the rights of LGBTQ+Americans, the shuttering of a decades-old institution focused on outward support hit the community hard.
“It’s another stone on a pile of stones,” Zeidner said. “I think it’s really important to see that all of this rhetoric is not victimless. There are real people every day who hear the world saying, ‘You’re not OK. We don’t value you the same way we value others.’”
Messages like that, which have been leveled not only against LGBTQ+ people, but also immigrants and refugees, he said, create a culture of fear and anxiety, and can trigger PTSD from previous trauma.
“We were starting to make social gains in being more accepting of each other,” Zeidner said. “Now I think we’ve taken some large steps back. It is just one more big deal on a long list of big deals right now.
For-profit’s motivations questioned
Rohn of OutFront Minnesota voiced skepticism of the motivations for Pride’s shifts, which included statements from UHS that the residential program wasn’t financially viable.
UHS, Rohn said, is “a Fortune 500 company that owns a lot of health care organizations. They’ve reported profits on most of their financial statements as a company. It is concerning in this environment when a larger company decides to close down a specific set of services for a specific community at a time when they are not experiencing losses as a whole.”
Zeidner added that a large national for-profit organization like UHS has different expectations for financial viability within its programs. But he wondered if some of their stated challenges were surmountable.
“We all have to cover our bills. I know there were physical plant challenges they needed to remedy and there were census challenges, but my guess is the tolerance of some of that by a national company was less than could be tolerated by a local company.”
All residential recovery programs experience shifts in census – or the number of patients enrolled – Zeidner said. “People don’t want to be in treatment on Christmas, for instance, so our census drops at that time. Soon thereafter, it comes up because people have a tough time at Christmas. There is a certain kind of volatility in this industry.”
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Representatives from UHS did not respond to a request for comment about the reasons behind Pride’s closure of its Twin Cities residential treatment programs.
Though Rohn said that she can “only speculate” on UHS’s motivation, the announcement did not come as a surprise: “The reality is across the social services, folks are in a place of deep concern about financial viability. We’ve seen closures across the state.”
Does Zeidner think Pride’s closure was in response to a growing anti-LGBTQ+ political rhetoric? “The question has to cross one’s mind,” he said. “Why now? I have no information that would suggest that it is not an unreasonable question. But you would hope that’s not the case – that it was more of a business decision.”
Stuart Morrical, the director of business development at Pride Institute, said he believes that the staff that remains at the organization’s Minneapolis campus maintain their commitment to the LGBTQ+ community.
“The bottom line is we’re all advocates,” Morrical said. “And things can change in the future.” Despite the residential program’s closure, he continued, Pride is “still offering really good-quality care for the LGBTQ community.”
