Jason Woody has been leading B’More Clubhouse as its executive director for 11 years. The program – now housed in a historic Mount Vernon firehouse at the intersection of Calvert and Read streets – is the only one of its kind in Maryland. The Clubhouse model began in New York in 1948, and has now expanded across the country and the globe, providing community-based psychosocial rehabilitation for people with severe depression, schizophrenia, severe bipolar disorder and other serious mental illnesses.
Clubhouse helps its members rejoin society and maintain their place in it. It builds on people’s strengths and provides mutual support, along with professional staff support, for people to receive work training, educational opportunities, and social support while offering people living with mental illness opportunities for friendship, employment, housing and more. Advocates say that social and economic inclusion reverses trends of higher suicide, hospitalization and incarceration rates associated with mental illness.
Woody sees potential for the B’More Clubhouse model to be replicated throughout the state. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Baltimore Fishbowl: What do you find valuable about the Clubhouse concept?
Jason Woody: The concept is valuable because, simply put it, it works. It’s driven by research. I think a lot of people that participate in our clubhouse – and around the country and around the world – get stuck in a situation where they’re labeled as a lifelong patient, …as a consumer, someone that just has to go to various places and receive services.
The Clubhouse turns that upside down. We’re not an alternative to traditional treatment, and we’re certainly in support of traditional forms of treatment, but it’s a place where people can focus on their personhood rather than the patienthood aspect. It is a place where people are empowered to utilize the skills that they already have and to gain new skills, if that makes sense. It’s one thing to go get therapy and to take medication and manage your symptoms, which is obviously very important. But it’s another thing to have a reason to be healthy and to maintain your health, because you have things that you want to do in your life. Most people want to work, have friends and gain an education and have quality housing, and so the Clubhouse is a place where people can really be themselves and focus on the things that they want to do in their lives, rather than just going somewhere and talking about what’s wrong with them.
BFB: Are there a set of expectations for and accountability for Clubhouse members?
JW: We don’t set goals for people. People set their own goals, and once you join as a member, membership is free and as far as we’re concerned, and this is true in any Clubhouse, it’s a lifetime membership. That doesn’t mean that you have to keep coming here for the rest of your life, and most people don’t. But if you join, you can choose to come and go as you please, and to interact with the clubhouse in the way that you see fit for yourself at that given time.
So some people are coming here primarily to socialize. Some people are coming here primarily to have a daily purpose like work to do every day, to be involved and be productive. Some people are coming here to get support for their return to work or school or with housing or other things like that. Most people are coming for some combination of those things…We do help people complete goal plans, but we don’t set that expectation for people. People set that for themselves. We ask folks like what they want to do, and how can we help them?
BFB: What’s the staffing like for the clubhouse? Who are the professionals that are there?
JW: The staffing at our Clubhouse and all Clubhouses is intentionally small, because one of the things that makes the Clubhouse model effective is that the members are truly needed to actually run the organization.
And the heart of the program is what we call our work-ordered day, where members are doing everything from answering the phones to cooking lunch to tracking data to cleaning and anything you can really imagine that would go into running a nonprofit organization.
But we currently have seven full-time staff and about 40 members that are coming each day. In terms of the professional background of our staff, it’s not a requirement to have a mental health or behavioral health background. We do have a program director who’s a licensed social worker, but most of our staff are really just coming from varied backgrounds – not from the mental health field. We’re not clinicians here, and we’re not trying to be. We’re looking for staff that are dynamic, that can engage people, that are humble, and that can accept help from members. …It’s more of we’re colleagues with each other in running the organization.
BFB: If I came inside as a visitor, what would it look like to me? What does the space look like?
JW: We’re in a really neat building….this old firehouse in Mount Vernon, the corner of Calvert and Read Street. It very briefly was a brew pub. The clubhouse is set up into different work teams, or work units.
When you come in, the floors are very open — downstairs, on our first floor, we have our membership and our culinary teams. The membership would come in and see the reception desk, people are answering the phone, people working on the computer, tracking attendance, people doing reach out calls to members that haven’t come in for a while. And then you would see, you know beyond that, our kitchen people prepare breakfast and lunch every day and dinner a couple times a week.
Upstairs, we have what we now call our ‘bizcom’ team, or business and communications team. So that’s folks that are working on our monthly newsletter social media, keeping our social media sites updated, planning our social events, which we do on evenings and weekends and holidays, and then working to develop partners. We have folks in the business area working to develop partnerships with employers to help members come back to work, obviously supporting members who are already currently working, and doing the same for people who are in school or want to go to school.
BFB: If you’re a member, can you show up whenever you want? Are you supposed to show up daily?
JW: You can go whenever you want. We have probably about 15 or 20 people that are here, a core group that comes just about every day that we’re open. And then we have a lot of people who come more sporadically, maybe once or twice a week. Some people we might not see more than once or twice a month, because people are doing different things. Some people are working full time, and pop in every once in a while, and again, some people need something to do every single day, so they’re here working and helping to run a Clubhouse.
BFB: Can you explain to me the analysis and studies that have been done about the financial benefits that the Clubhouse program provides to the overall health system?
JW: Several years ago, we did a study with Johns Hopkins School of Public Health that looked at public mental health costs of B’More Clubhouse members compared to a control group of adults living with mental illness in Baltimore who are not members of the Clubhouse. That study found that the B’More Clubhouse members had a 50% lower cost to Maryland public mental health system compared to the control group. There wasn’t anything conclusive in the study about exactly why, but we are pretty sure it’s because it’s far less likely for our members to be hospitalized, because they’re way less likely to become isolated, which helps to reduce some of the negative impacts of people’s illness. If someone’s involved, and they have a community and they feel needed, and they have opportunities to do other things in their lives, they’re less likely to isolate and to become more ill.
The other study was from Fountain House, in New York City. It opened in 1948 and we are not directly affiliated with it but they are part of the Clubhouse network, and they did a recent study…for people living with serious mental illness … they estimated savings of at least $682 million and there’s about 190 to 200 clubhouses in the US. And they had projected in that study that if, if only 5% of people living with serious mental illness in the United States had access to a clubhouse that could produce annual savings of $8.5 billion
BFB: It looks like you’re you’re getting some public funding to do some improvements. Can you talk to me about that?
JW: Well, we did just get a $50,000 capital grant award from the state to support the construction of an elevator….A couple of years ago we got a $500,000 grant from the Baltimore Mayor’s Office — American Rescue Plan Act funding that was really a one-time gift to help sustain our program during the pandemic and to build up our capacity to serve more people. So that was a huge; that was our largest grant that we’ve ever gotten, and really helped us get through some tough times and been able to pick our heads up and kind of think about the future and how we can sustain B’More Clubhouse but also kind of lead the way in helping to expand Clubhouses around the state. We’re the only one in the state of Maryland. Pennsylvania, for example, has about 20 clubhouses. Michigan has 40 clubhouses. There’s a lot of need and opportunity, I think, in Maryland, to replicate this model. So we’re currently in some conversations with people in the Department of Health about ways that we can sustain B’More Clubhouse, but also lead the way in helping to bring the Clubhouse model to other parts of the state.
BFB: How do you receive money? Are you able to bill Medicaid?
JW: Yes, it is a reimbursement for services….We get about a third of our funding for Medicaid, and then the other two thirds from grants and donations.
BFB: How do neighbors geographically respond and relate? There’s a lot of NIMBYism in the world. Has B’More Clubhouse experienced that?
JW: I’ve been really pleased, to be honest. We’ve been in Mount Vernon since we opened in 2009, and the building we’re in now, we purchased it right at the end of 2020. We were kind of worried that there might we might be treated a little bit differently as buyers versus renters. I’ve been here basically since the organization started, and I think the entire time, our neighbors have treated us really well, and I think people have become more curious since we’ve been in this really prominent and cool building. We have people that just wander in, like, thinking that we’re still a restaurant or something like that all the time… pretty much universally, the response has been very positive.
What a wonderful thing!