Sometimes friends change in ways that can be quite exciting

One of the most pleasant surprises of Empowerment Days was seeing Jackie McKay who was in the first peer specialist training with me nearly eight years ago. When I met her Jackie was involved in the Office of Consumer Affairs at the Milwaukee County Mental Health Complex. She was often exciting and fun to be around. Sometimes a little too exciting.

Her living situation was chaotic and I remember how difficult it was talking with her on the telephone with so many relatives in the house. She would be interrupted by someone else picking up the phone, not knowing or caring whether anyone else was talking. We had enjoyable time at grassroots Empowerment several years ago but it was clear she had a lot of issues and problems to solve.

We fell out of touch after it seemed she was going to live with her father and I developed a relationship with another woman. I also focused on college, earning a degree from Milwaukee Area Technical College in Human Services. Encouraged by my success,  I went on to the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in the Helen Bader School of Social Welfare. Last year I decided to withdraw from the university and apply myself to improving myself as a peer specialist.

When the new supported apartment programs opened I was able to fight my way onto the schedule and secure a pay raise. Jackie’s life took a very different trajectory as she became involved with the wrong man and eventually got into trouble with the law. It was her connections to peer support that helped lead her back to safety and more positive decision making. One of her anchors to sanity was the Warmline, a consumer led organization that handles non-crisis telephone calls. She has been a peer volunteer on Warmline for six years and helped dozens of people seeking recovery.

When I arrived at Empowerment Days Sunday afternoon, Jackie was the first person I recognized. We just sat and talked and caught up with one another. I referred to her in my presentation that evening as I remembered her and Melissa Butts, who was also in my training group. Tuesday morning Jackie and I visited the staff of several state  legislators, including Rep. Peggy Krusick and Rep. JoCasta Zamarripa and Sen. Tim Carpenter and G. Spencer Coggs. Clearly this was not the Jackie  I had known before but a woman who proclaimed “I am the evidence that recovery works.” Truer words had never been spoken.

I think there’s a real lesson in what happened because I could have yelled at Jackie and simply pushed her away trying to get her to make the changes she needed in her life. Instead I decided she was not in a place where she could be the kind of friend that I needed. I recalled seeing her briefly at a bus stop and not wanting to have anything to do with her a few years ago. I was already involved with someone else.

My decision to go to Empowerment Days was a conscious one to become more involved in the mental health consumer movement. I wanted to lend my voice and I rediscovered my gifts during the three days. Although I began this piece by describing the changes my friend had made, I also need to acknowledge the way I had changed for the better.

Yes, I’m a liberal drinker, isn’t everyone?

Last night after work I went to the meeting of Drinking Liberally, a group of ne’er do wells who meet at the Transfer Pizza to socialize. and kick back a few drinks in a comfortable atmosphere.Getting there represented a logistical challenge since I worked at 27th and Loomis and needed two buses to reach 1st and Mitchell St. I walked several blocks down Mitchell because I expected the bus to arrive at 8:45.

I wanted to meet the featured speaker Mahlon Mitchell, a confident young African-American man who is running for Lieutenant Governor. He was sought out as a candidate three months ago, far before the recall election was certified by the Government Accountability Board. Mitchell is president of the Wisconsin Firefighters Association and lives with his wife, April and their two children in Fitchburg which is just outside of Madison. He was born in 1977 around the time I was graduating from the University of Buffalo as a non-traditional student. He’s even younger than all of my nephews.

To say that Mahlon faces an uphill battle would be understating the case. This is a very white state and only one African-American Vel Phillips has ever been elected to state wide office. In the state’s largest city, Milwaukee, fewer than half of the black men are in the labor force, according to a report published by the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. The state is still reeling from the unjust killing of Bo Morrison  a bi-racial young man who was shot while standing on a porch by a man who claimed he  was defending his castle.

Moreover, we are more likely to find African-Americans behind bars or  in bars than working at the construction sites around town. In some ways, as bleak as things may be, this is the right time for new leadership to emerge from the community. Recently Eyon Biddle a first term county supervisor with a union background, ran unsuccessfully against incumbent Willie Hines. At the same time G. Spencer Coggs became the first African-American elected to city-wide office in his victory to become Milwaukee City Treasurer. His niece Milele Coggs continues to impress as a young leader on the Common Council.

Things are changing, though far too slowly. I encouraged Mahlon to press for change in the way Wisconsin uses its federal mental health block grant. In the weeks ahead I will be contacting him about my concerns. It seemed fitting that I met him the day that the Walker administration trashed the state’s contract with Talgo, the Spanish train manufacturer. Despite the fact Wisconsin had invested millions of dollars under previous governor Jim Doyle on upgrading our rail infrastructure, soon to be recalled Scott Walker made killing this deal a priority once he took office.

If all goes well, we will have an opportunity to reverse those job killing policies in Madison and set an example for the rest of the country to  follow.

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Re-designing mental Health

I was at a meeting last week to discuss the redesign of the mental health system in Milwaukee County. I had been one of the key informants interviewed by the consultants hired to produce a report  on ways to fix our broken system. Many positive trends can be seen in the way that quality supportive housing has been built to assist people with severe and persistent mental illness live productively  in the community.

Mental health is one of the major responsibilities of Milwaukee county government. The re-design comes at a time when there will be a large turnover on the board of supervisors. And our county executive Chris Abele will be seeking his first full term of office. Boxed into a corner by previous county executive Scott Walker he has faced sniping from right wing Sheriff David Clarke. Clarke seems to think that he is an entity unto himself and no one can tell him anything. Added to that problem is the fact far too many people with mental illness become involved in the criminal justice system. Not the kind of dramatic and violent episodes sensationalized in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel but more mundane things resulting from inappropriate behavior. This can result in being saddled with hundreds of dollars in tickets and killing any chances of obtaining employment.

I have found that having a significant role in society has been a powerful force in my recovery from distress. The change from self doubt to confidence has been profound and one that I constantly seek to share with others. I feel we do people a disservice when we numb their minds to a point where they can barely find the strength to shuffle to a community support program several times a week. At some point mental health needs to mean being out in the world, tending a garden, helping a friend move his or her belongings, sharing a movie and making good choices.

That is why I have been encouraging the consumers I assist to join the conversation about re-designing the mental health system. Although I work in the system, I was never a patient. I never sat in the Psychiatric Crisis Center early in the morning waiting to be seen, although I have heard about people, talked wit survivors and assisted them. Because I am a veteran I had a whole range of alternatives available to me. My unique perspective is valuable to the re-design process, as well. I learned the language about person centered processes with attending Milwaukee Area Technical College and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. I am excited to hear others passing it along. Implementing the approach will be a whole new animal and one that will engage people in this county for years to come. Now we must roll up our sleeves and get to work on creating a more humane and fair system.

 

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One of the 44%

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel has published a front page story about the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee Center for Development about the disappearance from the job market of African American men. Over the past 40 years employment levels for men 16 to 64, a group which includes me, have fallen from 73% to just barely 44%.  At the same time, incarceration rates have risen dramatically. Even for men not incarcerated, it’s not uncommon to find they are paying off tickets for disorderly conduct or other offenses.  At the same time, they we are leaving the job scene, we are actually becoming less employable.

According to the UWM study, the bottom 5 cities for black male employment were

1. Chicago 48.3%
2. Cleveland 47.7%
3. Milwaukee44.7%
4. Buffalo 43.9%
5. Detroit43.0%

The top 5 were

1. Washington 66.6%
2. Dallas 61.%
3. Boston 59.7%
4. Minneapolis 59.3%
5. Atlanta 59.0%

You will notice that those top levels of employment are nowhere near the peak level from 40 years ago.  Further, the declines in employment levels covered white, Hispanic and black men. It is a trend that mirrored the de-industrialization of northern cities.  As our jobs fled south and later to China (that giant sucking sound Ross Perot  warned  us about) we have been left with lower paid positions in the service industry.

The factory jobs that remain are largely performed by robots that do all the manual labor that our parents used to do. It’s called getting more out of workers or some fancy term like “productivity.”

As an African-American male I find this situation troubling. When I left Buffalo in 1980 it was already in decline. Although things looked better in my new home of Milwaukee, it, too was on the way down. Despite two college degrees I found it difficult to develop and sustain a satisfactory career.  In recent years I have created a new career, as a peer specialist and for the first time my income and hours worked began to rise. I guess I should feel grateful but I worry about the long term implications of the UWM study.

My nephew John has started a family in Buffalo. Will he fall victim, too? Is America prepared to ignore the skills of millions men who play by the rules and strive for a piece of the dream? Are we going to recapture those jobs that fled our shores? Can a man who creates jobs in the Cayman Islands and Switzerland understand the plight of American workers? I don’t think so, Mitt! Can a man who labelled Barack Obama “the food stamp president” identify with the issues facing low income workers? No way, Newt. Will the former publisher of racist newsletters give a damn whether black men and women drown in this economy?

Barack Obama’s future is tied to our success. We may not return to the employment levels of the 1970s overnight but that’s the only way we can create an America that is born to succeed.

Related articles

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Evidence-Based Practices

I remember hearing about City Year a program that recruits enthusiastic young people to help mentor students in schools. I think it was the first time I heard of the term evidence based practice. I had tried a similar approach as a librarian at the University of Wisconsin-Parkside years ago. We recruited student reference assistants to help mentor younger students and we published an article about our results. this was an effort to improve the retention of minority students at the university. One of the requirements that the university implemented was that the students needed to develop the ability to access information that they needed for their classes.

The reference librarians were expected to act as teachers in classes about the library. I did some research to help determine that we were losing minority students as fast as we could enroll them at the university. Could the situation be improved?

Now, years later, in Milwaukee, we are seeing a program called City Year with proven results in Boston, being implemented to mentor struggling students. The program rewards the mentors for their hard work and self sacrifice through assisting them with college.  This being Milwaukee there were the usual negative comments about the article promoting City Year in today’s Milwaukee Journal  Sentinel. Accompanying the article was a picture of mostly African-American young people in their City Year uniforms proudly showing up. And there were some positive parents whose children had participated in City Year who rose up and defended the idea. At least one person reported on the positive results that City Year had helped achieve in other locations. It is an evidence based practice.

A few years ago, I helped rally support for some other evidence based practices, like the Crisis Resource Center, which diverts people from possible encounters with the criminal justice system or inpatient mental health treatment. I also worked on an effort to implement training first responders in recognizing that the persons they encounter may be experiencing mental health problems. After some initial resistance, Crisis Intervention Team training and Crisis Intervention Partnerships have grown beyond our original vision.

This semester, through my field work placement and research class, I will be learning more about developing and implementing research based programs and activities in social work. To use that horrible phrase, “I have come full circle.” It’s time to learn what works.

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