ONE HOT MEAL AT A TIME –
Dec. 3, 2025 – WHEN EVAN CARVER shuffled into the chapel of Salvation Army’s rehab center looking frail and steadying himself with a walker, he wasn’t sure he could quit fentanyl for good. But after a 10-year opioid addiction and five years homeless on the streets of San Francisco, he knew he wanted to “stop hurting.”
It wasn’t just the throbbing pain of swollen legs with open sores. It was also the guilt and shame that shadowed his addiction.
So when a Salvation Army leader told rehab participants that “the only thing you have to change is everything,” Evan, 35, internalized the message.
Over the next six months at the South of Market treatment center, he was a model participant and leader. He cared for his long-neglected wounds, found healing through meditation and reconnected with his 13-year-old son, whom he hadn’t seen in eight years. He volunteered as a dorm leader, group mentor and member of the facility’s residents’ council.
In early October, Evan stood at the pulpit of that same chapel to celebrate his graduation with family and friends seated in the front row. Balancing on his own, dressed in a plaid button-up shirt with his hair neatly parted to one side, he reflected on his recovery.
“Life before Harbor Light was miserable,” he told the group. But since then, he’d found healing and was “working every day to change” and be the “best son, brother, father and friend” he could be.
