By Lynnette M. Booker
On the corner of 88th Street and Columbus Avenue, lies a 638-sqaure-foot rustic office with no more than four employees. A wooden bench is perched outside against the bone-white, weathered panels that are incongruent to the neighborhood’s stone buildings. Inside this humble office desks are aligned tightly, buried under mountains of documents, and a small staff with a strong rapport works together to operate TOP Opportunities and GreenKeepers under Goddard Riverside Community Center.
As director of TOP Opportunities and GreenKeepers, Deborah Kaplan and her staff work busily five days a week to ensure job opportunities for their participants in the New York Metropolitan area. The last nine years, Kaplan has physically and emotionally dedicated her life to changing the way people with mental illness feel about themselves. “I like helping people move on with their lives,” she says, “offering hope to people and helping them see their dreams.” A personal mission that reminds Kaplan why she gets up seven days a week for over eight hours a day to render service to those who seek it. A strong mission that she shares with Goddard Riverside Community Center.
In 1959, two historic settlement houses merged to create something bigger than either one alone: the Riverside Community House, which was founded in 1887, and Goddard Neighborhood Center, which was founded in 1862, both evolved in to Goddard Riverside Community Center, a non-profit organization in New York City. With 26 programs to meet the needs of thousands of senior citizens, adults, and children, Kaplan manages the supportive employment program at TOP Opportunities and GreenKeepers. At 64, Kaplan works hard to reach the organization’s goals of providing intensive supportive employment and job retention services to formerly homeless people who have severe and persistent mental illness.
“People come to TOP Opportunities because one, they have a mental illness and two, perhaps have a history of homelessness,” says Kaplan. “They come because they want to go to wok.” Kaplan and her staff are achieving and exceeding their program goals to help sustain Goddard Riverside as an exemplary non-profit organization in New York City. Charity Navigator rated Goddard Riverside Community Center four stars, as one of New York City;s leading human services organization.
“We’re very proud to be recognized as an organization that exceeds industry standards,” says Christina McSwain, the public Relations and Communications manager for Goddard Riverside. “We have strong infrastructure and operations practices that allow us to operate with a sustainable model of program delivery and service offerings.”
Every year, about 42.5 million American adults suffers from some mental illness, enduring conditions such as depression, bipolar disorder or schizophrenia. According to Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA). Approximately 9.3 million adults, ages 18 and up, experience serious mental illness that sometime impedes day-to-day activities, such as going to work.
“Just think about if you are the employer and you wanted to hire somebody and somebody said ‘yeah I really love to work with you but I take medication, and I can’t get up early, and I have mental illness’ and how would you respond to that, would you still want to hire them?,” Kaplan says with an emphatic no.
This is where Kaplan’s job comes in, by seeking and maintain partnerships with supportive employers to work with TOPOP participants to have a strong rapport. “We don’t want people to ire people because of charity but we do want them to be a little bit understand sometimes and allow us to coach somebody.”
The United States, it is estimated that 75 to 85 percent of people with severe mental illness are unemployed. Yet despite the high unemployment rates, surveys consistently show that most people with severe mental illness want to work. Employment may lead to improvements in outcome through increasing self-esteem, alleviating psychiatric symptoms, and reducing dependency. According to Kaplan, vocational training and supported employment are different ways of helping persons with mental illness return to work and diminish self-stigmatization. The stigma of metal illness, although more related to context than a person’s appearance , remains a powerful negative attribute in all social relations. The reality of discriminatory practices supplies a very real incentive to keep mental health problems a secret.
“There is this huge stigma against people with mental illness and that stigma becomes self-stigma. People have incorporated societal stigma onto themselves. A lot of it is lack of knowledge about what mental illness is. A lot of it is the headline in the newspaper making people afraid to work with people who have mental illness because they don’t understand that most people do not have violent tendencies. Those are the few sensationalized cases,” Kaplan explains.
Kaplan’s main focus is to find resources for her participants through TOPOP, which is also known as The Other Program that started in 2001, as a supported employment program. As participants became more stable in the community and were permanently housed, they desired more meaningful work opportunities and competitive wage employment, as means to further their own independence and reintegration into society at large. Today, TOPOP not only places individuals in competitive wage jobs it continues to support people so that job retention and wellness can be maintained throughout all the ups and downs of everyday life while coping with their mental illness. Sixty percent of participants have co-occurring chemical abuse diagnoses. The vast majority of TOPOP’s clients have been outside of the workforce for as many as five to 10 years due to their homelessness and untreated mental illness. Others come to TOPOP in collaboration with Goddard’s continuum of service to provide comprehensive rehabilitation and recovery service.
Even though these programs started before Kaplan’s arrival to Goddard Riverside, her experience at Fountain House prepared her t drive TOPOP and GreenKeepers forward. Graduating from Boston University with a bachelor’s in education, Kaplan never saw herself n social work. Now with a master’s in social work from Fordham University, she “still enjoys the work and really enjoys knowing where someone came in and seeing where they are today.” Working for Goddard over nine years as the director of TOPOPs and GreenKeepers, she also does something that is most vital for her two programs: she helps that development department know what her programs do so that they can write grants. Having to find funding, and then new funding for her programs is quite demanding, especially with a precarious economy. Wit ongoing economic changes, it is unclear how long or how many people Kaplan will be able to help when funding short. “Up until recently we were able to have people stay with us for very, very long periods of time, but as funding becomes more difficult to get and as government agencies are trying to watch their bottom-line, they prefer that we don’t keep people,” she says.
Most of Goddard’s funding is from government . They are funded by the department of health and mental hygiene, state office of mental health, New York state education department, which serves people with vocational or educational goals, and people with disabilities. They also receive money through the Greenacres Foundation.
In the last year, TOPOP has made profound achievements without difficulty. They exceeded their anticipated enrollment by 27, placing 75 percent of active members in a Level 1 or internship job within three to nine months, achieving a 69 percent employment rate among their participants throughout the year set to maintain at 65 percent. they were able to achieve this through strong partnerships with area employers, increased internship opportunities at Goddard Riverside, and new contracts and partnerships available through their social purpose business, GreenKeepers. “Just this year alone, staff from our Home-Delivered Meals, GreenKeepers, 140th Street residence and Options Center have received awards from various organizations at the local and national levels.” says McSwain, who is 30, and has been employed with Goddard Riverside for two years working on a development team to raise the visibility of Goddard Riverside.
GreenKeepers is most unique feature of the TOP Opportunities Program. Begun I 1995 as a landscaping business that employs over 30 part-time TOPOP workers and five crew leaders, GreenKeepers currently manages over 165 contracts for horticulture and street sanitation services. Its social enterprise business that allows the opportunity to offer on-the-job training and competitive wage employment to participants who choose this type of work. Though the work is seasonal, it offers an opportunity to build both soft and hard job skills within a highly supervised group setting. Typically TOPOP participants have difficulty getting jobs they interview for because of low self-esteem and poor social skills, and a lack of paid work experiences, educational qualifications, or recent job references. GreenKeepers has given many members their first actual paid work experience and has acted as a stepping stone to the world of work.
Kaplan and her team assist many GreenKeepers with their resume writing and interview skills, goal setting and life skills coaching, budgeting and benefits planning to crew members who were ready to transition to new employment opportunities. As a result, several GreenKeepers and former GreenKeepers each year reap the benefits of the transformational nature of this work and make great leaps in personal and professional achievement. She will be overseeing future plans for TOPOP, which include several gardening projects at Goddard Riverside and within the community. They will work on a large landscape installation for one of Goddard Riverside’s residence hall that includes plantings, construction of a privacy wall, building benches, and renovating tree pits in the front of buildings.
“I am satisfied by the work and enjoy the work. It has become harder and harder in the tough economic environment that we live in. The technology has taken away a lot of the kinds of jobs that people we work with use to do well at, those very routine jobs. Now everybody has to multitask and learn five different jobs and people with mental illness in general have a harder time with that level of flexibility and it takes them a while to learn something,” says Kaplan.
“Our primary goal is to continue to meet the needs of those who need us most. We work hand in hand with people, no matter what their life circumstances, background or age, to achieve the kind of life they want for themselves and their families,” says McSwain.
To Kaplan, “the best part is seeing how work changes people lives, how they change how they think about themselves, changes how they live and what they aspire to do, how it gives them a sense of belonging in society because what is the first thing that everybody says when you meet them is where do your work? A sense of identity, coming out of being that mentally ill person to a person who works and contribute and often wants to do more and more after, that is most satisfying part.”
Vivacity to Blog 