Ideas We Should Steal: The Citizens Project

Jul. 23, 2018

When Albert Rivera showtime started attention classes twice a calendar week with the Citizens–Community Enhancement Project in New Haven, Connecticut last December, he was doing it for the $10 they offered participants. He was abusing cocaine and heroin and living in a hospital equally function of an in-patient treatment program, and he needed the coin.

Just over the class of the adjacent half-dozen months, something changed. With the help of his 15 or so classmates and two mentors, he realized that others experienced the same lack of connexion to social club that he felt; got advice virtually his day to twenty-four hour period challenges; and learned to speak more than articulately so he could advocate for himself and his community.

Today, Albert is clean, and though he graduated from the Projection last month so is no longer paid for his attendance and expertise, he still stops by the Citizens Project every week; at present he attends for the company and the support, rather than for the ten dollar bill. Now he is, as he puts it, "a part of something else bigger than myself"—and that made all the divergence.

The Citizens Project was launched nearly two decades ago past a team of researchers in Yale University'south psychiatry department who worked closely with the city's homeless population. While placing those who had been living without a roof over their heads into secure homes, the team noticed a disturbing trend: that roof, and the societal responsibility and norms that came with information technology, fabricated many of people they were looking to serve uncomfortable.

"Lo and behold people would say to usa, 'You know, I'm going to go live on the street once more,'" says Michael Rowe, one of the initial designers of the project and Co-Director of Yale's Program for Recovery and Community Health . "We had to think well-nigh identity and resources and the things we could offer people. Nosotros were not equipped to aid people become neighbors and community members and citizens, and then we had to work outside of the organization of intendance."

The Citizens Project, then, started as a research study attempting to uncover the anxieties that led people who had been struggling with housing stability to reject a prophylactic, comfortable habitation. Rowe and his team found that the people they were working with felt disconnected from any kind of community; they were uncertain virtually both the societal and political norms that governed everyday interactions.

"Philadelphia is a urban center with a shocking number of people who have been incarcerated or are under some course of court supervisions," says McKee. "Giving people empowerment and that sense of community and connectedness and personal bonds is what's really going to propel someone to invest in this future, in this kind of life."

The researchers realized they could teach these norms and skills, and hopefully reduce the barriers to true citizenship that seem so unproblematic to many but so impossible to overcome for Rowe's clients. That became what the project is today: a twice-per week, two-hr long class where attendees mentor each other and learn from the project's leaders near the v Rs of citizenship: relationships, responsibility, resources, rights, and roles.

The goal is uncomplicated: Provide the participants with a sense of belonging in their community and their government, and show them how to advocate for themselves in everyday relationships and in the broader political spectrum.

A formal study of the programme in 2013 establish that its bear on is significant. Drug and alcohol use dropped amongst participants past 55 percent, while members of the control group, who received traditional forms of intervention, dropped substance use past merely 20 percent. Quality of life indicators among participants in the Project also increased substantially, including satisfaction with daily activities and with jobs. Criminal charges decreased among all participants in the study.

Perhaps most noticeably, homelessness in New Haven decreased past 24 percent between 2014 and 2017; though this has not been formally tied to the work of the Citizens Project, the timing indicates that Rowe and his colleagues are impacting the metropolis's success. As a result, it has been or is in the process of being replicated as near past equally Pennsylvania'south land prisons—led past peer support grouping Peerstar —and as far away equally Scotland, Brazil, and New Zealand.

The plan, which hosts between 12 and eighteen students at a fourth dimension and is funded past the Connecticut Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services, specifically serves individuals currently participating in mental health handling services who have interacted with the criminal justice arrangement in some way in the by 2 years. Though information technology is not a requirement to participate, some students have struggled with homelessness.

For the start 60 minutes of each class, students engage in an action called "What's Up?," in which they mentor each other. They share stories of disconnect, counsel each other virtually how to appropriately handle tense relationships or situations, and share information about resources related to housing and employment. Students are explicitly taught how to listen and how to offer someone else effective criticism, and everyone is required to speak.

For the second one-half of each class, Project Directors Patricia Benedict and Josephine Buchanan lead a session on one of the five Rs. Students learn about housing and how to establish a positive human relationship with their landlord, or hash out anger management or communication skills every bit part of the relationship segment of the course. They learn virtually the legislative process and voting to accost their rights and responsibilities.

Before graduating from the program, students complete an entirely self-directed value project, in which they somehow share what they have learned with the community. They tin share what they've learned about their ain talents and skills—one educatee read a poem he had written in a public space for the first time—or the noesis they've acquired virtually the community and how it works—one grouping nerveless food for a local nutrient banking concern.

"Our process is to help them to get connected to their community but in order to do that they have to feel some value in themselves," explains Bridegroom, whose ain background as a Native American pushed her toward working with those who struggle with alienation. "Nosotros talk about the entire person. All of our students are in treatment for mental health. All of our students take been involved in the criminal justice system. Some are homeless. Many have addiction problems. What nosotros work with people is to evidence them that that doesn't identify you; that isn't your identity. You are a person first. You lot are a human existence."

Drug and alcohol use dropped among participants by 55 percent, while members of the control grouping, who received traditional forms of intervention, dropped substance use by only 20 percent. Meanwhile, homelessness in New Haven decreased by 24 percent between 2014 and 2017.

Rivera took what he learned at the Citizens Project and immediately put information technology into action. He is an active fellow member of Witnesses to Hunger, a projection started in Philadelphia that uses the firsthand cognition of parents attempting to feed children on express incomes to push for change in laws affecting them. Just this month, he met with Connecticut Democratic Senator Chris Murphy every bit a member of the grouping to hear him talk about his efforts to protect SNAP, or food stamp, funding. Rivera is currently actively seeking employment.

Rivera as well, as Bridegroom hopes for all of her students, learned a great deal about himself. "It was an opportunity that I near didn't take considering I wasn't sure of myself. They gave me confidence and a new way of looking at life and at people," he says. "Information technology definitely was a dandy aid not merely in my substance use only as a person besides. I was able to empathise other people who are going through things just like me and to be able to advocate for myself."

Michael McKee of Broad Street Ministry, which among a host of other services, partners with neighborhood groups to support people facing criminal charges, is intimately familiar with the intersection of mental health, addiction, and homelessness that may pb a person to reject a perfectly good and available home, and says the problem is certainly not specific to New Oasis.

In 2017, 15,000 people in Philadelphia sought access to a homeless shelter, and 450 people in Centre City alone lived on the streets. Though merely a tiny percentage of the city's population, the homeless brand upwardly approximately xxx percentage of Philly's prison system. Nationally ane in five homeless people had a serious mental affliction, and the aforementioned number had a substance corruption problem, an in Philly, drug overdose is the number one cause of expiry amongst homeless people. These issues are, as may exist expected, intertwined, and accept created a demand for programs like the Citizens Project in big cities beyond the state.

" I remember we often kind of underestimate the touch on of alienation and look it to sort of go away every bit soon every bit a house is introduced," says McKee. "Folks living on the streets for shared survival have to larn to network and share resources. To pluck someone away from that and place them into a pretty isolated living system can really rattle people. We run into people render to the streets or practise information technology function time to ease that transition."

When you add interaction with the criminal justice system to the mix, you often find people who are sick prepared to deed as or feel like citizens at all. McKee tells the story of a human who, afterward coming domicile from a long prison house sentence, took issue with the term, "returning citizen." "He said, 'I hate that phrase. I didn't experience much similar I was treated like a denizen earlier I went in, then I'm not certain what I'thou returning to,'" relays McKee.

Several programs in Philadelphia utilize some of the aforementioned principles and address some of the same challenges as the Citizens Project does . The Reentry Think Tank hires up to a dozen fellows at a time, all returning citizens, to connect with government officials and people in ability across the metropolis in guild to amplify their voices and experience. And the Philadelphia Fights Institute for Customs Justice offers support services and classes ranging from financial literacy to wellness intendance advocacy to those recently released from prison . But with 40,000 people returning from jails and prisons to Philadelphia each year, at that place is a demand for more.

"Philadelphia is a city with a shocking number of people who accept been incarcerated or are nether some form of courtroom supervisions," he says. "Giving people empowerment and that sense of community and connection and personal bonds is what'south actually going to propel someone to invest in this future, in this kind of life."

Photo via Citizens Project

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Source: https://thephiladelphiacitizen.org/idea-we-should-steal-the-citizens-project/

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