Our Roots in Sutter County
Built After a Loss
On a Tuesday afternoon in September 2019, Mateo and Rosario Akwesi got the phone call every parent in the opioid epidemic dreads. Their son Ramon, twenty-eight years old and three months out of his second residential program, had been found unresponsive in a Marysville apartment from a fentanyl-laced pill he had taken thinking it was oxycodone. Both prior programs had been two hours from home — one in the Bay Area, one east of Sacramento — and Mateo and Rosario had spent two full years of weekends commuting to visit their son in treatment centers they did not trust and could not visit on weekday emergencies.
RRA Rehab opened on Plumas Street fourteen months after Ramon's death. The mission was direct: Sutter County families should not have to choose between distance and care, and the gap between needing help and finding it close to home should not be measured in two-hour drives.
Six years and 2,200+ alumni later, the Akwesi family still serves on the clinical advisory board and Rosario meets with every admitted family during their first week. Our small size — 37 beds — is intentional. It is the size at which one family can know every resident by name and every clinician can carry the founding promise without it becoming a slogan.
Evidence Before Folklore
Our mission is to make the best of current addiction medicine research available to every Sacramento Valley resident who needs it — without the distance, the impersonal scale, or the recovery folklore that hardened around many older programs. We measure ourselves by sustained sobriety, restored families, and the alumni who come back as peer mentors — not by referral volume or marketing reach.
Treatment Philosophy
Three commitments shape every plan. Motivational enhancement: we do not argue with ambivalence; we work alongside it, because the confrontational interventionist model rarely moves the needle for the residents who arrive here. Family-systems work: addiction reshapes households, so recovery has to reach the household — not just the resident in front of us. Spiritual exploration, not imposition: chaplaincy from any tradition, secular meaning-making groups, or neither — the question of what makes a sober life worth living belongs at the center of recovery, not the edges.
Our Clinical Team
Rosario Akwesi, CADC II
Co-Founder & Family Programs Director
Rosario lost her son Ramon to fentanyl overdose in 2019 and chartered RRA fourteen months later. A certified addiction counselor since 2021, she leads our family programming, meets every admitted family in their first week, and runs the parent and sibling support groups that continue free of charge for twelve months after discharge. She speaks English and Spanish.
Mateo Akwesi
Co-Founder & Executive Director
A retired Yuba County agricultural-extension agent and Ramon's father, Mateo leads day-to-day operations, the alumni mentorship program, and the relationships RRA holds with referring physicians, school counselors, and faith communities across Sutter County. His grandfather built the Plumas Street building in 1948 as a community boarding house.
Dr. Sarai Hara, MD, FASAM
Medical Director
Board-certified in addiction medicine, Dr. Hara trained at UC Davis and served eight years at Sutter Health's emergency department before joining RRA in 2021. She oversees medical detox, medication-assisted treatment, and the dual diagnosis protocols that have been continuously refined against the addiction medicine literature.
Maeve Donaldson, PsyD
Clinical Director
A clinical psychologist trained at the Wright Institute and the VA Northern California Health Care System, Maeve built RRA's motivational interviewing curriculum and supervises the creative-arts therapy program. Her published work on first-responder occupational trauma directly shapes our dual diagnosis pathway for police, fire, and EMS residents.
More Voices From the RRA Alumni
— Cassandra V., Residential & Family Track Alumni, May 2025"I had been arguing with my mother for fifteen years about my drinking. The day she drove me to RRA was the first time I had seen her cry without rage in her voice. Rosario sat with both of us on day two and told my mother about Ramon. Watching my mother hear that story changed something in our family I did not know was still changeable. Two years sober and we eat dinner together every Sunday."
— Bruno O., Dual Diagnosis Alumni, October 2025"I came to RRA furious because my employer made it a condition. By the second week I was the one asking for extra family sessions. Maeve and the clinical team caught a diagnosis my previous therapist had missed for a decade. Once the right medication and the right therapy lined up, sobriety stopped feeling like willpower and started feeling like clarity."