A new model for Vincentians’ detox center
The St. Vincent de Paul Society’s Ozanam Center in San Francisco is a short-term shelter for people dealing with substance abuse, many of them homeless. For those in the community who have fallen the hardest, it has long served as a place of relief. But Jesuit Father Frank Buckley thinks this hard-edged refuge on Howard Street could be a place of rest and recovery as well.
Father Buckley, along with Sister of St. Joseph of Carondelet Katie O’Shea, is leading an effort to transform the Ozanam environment into one of peace, nourishment and hospitality rather than chaos and survival. Their idea is to create a Wellness Center that keeps Ozanam’s basic services in place while bringing in physical and program changes to promote clients’ long-term health and invite a deeper humanity.
The Wellness Center is a significant initiative for SVDP, whose 150th anniversary in San Francisco this year will be honored Sunday at a Mass at St. Mary’s Cathedral to be celebrated by Archbishop George H. Niederauer. The center, scheduled to open in November and to be built up as grants and donations are secured, is a two-part effort designed to improve services for clients and broaden opportunities for volunteers. It emerged from soul-searching by the society’s leadership earlier this year as the organization coped with fiscal crisis and threatened program cuts.
The center points to a future in which volunteers – students from Jesuit-run colleges and high schools, members of Vincentian parish conferences, the general community – play a greater role in all the society’s programs. The society has been able to preserve its core government-backed services despite the threat of city funding cuts, but amid the recession and in the aftermath of the budget wars of 2009 Executive Director Chris Cody is looking for a broader support base.
“I need to reduce the reliance on government and make it a more sustainable mix of parish and community support, both financially and physically. Whatever your talents are, share them.” Sister Katie, who is the society’s chaplain, was the original spark for the Wellness Center. She envisioned Ozanam as a place of hospitality where clients and volunteers could form relationships to benefit one another. At Ozanam, volunteers could “take the mandate of Jesus very seriously and be comfortable with people they don’t know ... learn how to be with the stranger.”
Sister Katie said her idea for the Wellness Center is simply to greet the men and women seeking refuge with a smile and an offer of dignity.
“They come in that door usually and they’re so sad...They come through the door simply asking for a bed, for a mat,” she said.” They come in and they’re told to take a chair. This is the last stop. This is known as the last stop.”
Father Buckley enlarged on Sister Katie’s idea. In residence at St. Agnes Parish in San Francisco, he has worked in homelessness and addiction in San Francisco, Chicago and Los Angeles. The Jesuit also has studied interreligious dialogue in Nepal and yoga in India.
Drawing on Ignatian spirituality, he was interested in integrating mind, body and spirit. He developed a vision for the Wellness Center that began with nutrition as the first requirement for health.
He wondered why the homeless should eat baloney and mayonnaise sandwiches rather than fresh food from local farmer’s markets. He asked why they should not have green tea instead of just coffee.
From diet he turned to the physical environment. He proposed replacing the center’s metal doors with glass ones and, at the entrances, installing Asian-themed planters with bamboo and decorative stone. The clients at Ozanam are no different than anyone else, he said: they would welcome sunlight, brightly painted rooms and conversation, and some might enjoy making music, painting and poetry as well.
“We don’t give the homeless the least we’ve got,” Father Buckley said, “but we give them the best we’ve got.”
From the physical environment Father Buckley went, in the spirit of St. Ignatius, to the interior environment. Ozanam clients sleep on mattresses on the floor, and looking at this classic scene of a flop for alcoholics and drug users, one wonders what they dream. Father Buckley would offer these men – they are mostly men in the 38-bed center, with some beds reserved for women – the opportunity to experience inner calm through yoga and massage.
Father Buckley believes healthful food, rest and surroundings would have two practical effects. First, the changes would improve clients’ physical health: Father Buckley quotes a University of California at San Francisco study that found that a group of angioplasty patients who could not afford surgery and who instead underwent a program of prayer, nutrition and exercise lived longer than a control group that had the surgery. Second, he believes the environment would support clients in their work to break free of addiction.
The Jesuit is strong on a therapeutic technique called motivational interviewing and is convinced that a more nurturing environment would give clients more of a chance to succeed. The technique, pioneered by Dr. William Miller at the University of Mexico, has been used largely in affluent drug and alcohol programs and would be something new for people in detox who are homeless.
“For the last 30 years substance abuse treatment has focused on, ‘We have to break through the denial, be confrontational,’” he said. “This really asks a different question. It puts it straight on the client. They’re the persons who are changing. A little of them wants to change, a little wants to keep using. It asks a different question. Instead of, ‘Why don’t you stop using today,’ it asks, ‘Why don’t you keep using.’ Then they say, ‘My life has hit rock bottom.
“Just by talking like that, they become their own motivation for change,” Father Buckley said. “It’s a different approach all the way from intake to treatment program.”
During a recent visit to the center Father Buckley greeted Rosemary McLeod, Ozanam’s program director, and Waheema Shabazz, a program aide. Asked how she felt about the Wellness Center, McLeod said: “I think it’s fine if it’s done properly and everyone agrees to it.”
Shabazz said the detox program plays an increasingly important role in San Francisco and is known as a safe place to go in a rough South of Market neighborhood. “If this were to close down,” she said, “San Francisco would be a really messed-up city.”
Father Buckley said clients will come to Ozanam because they know they can get a good meal. But he also believes that once they arrive and become part of a group discussion in a welcoming setting, they may feel inspired.
“You might say isn’t that a little odd that you do this to help them get a sandwich, but you never know when that coin is going to drop,” he said. “In that group their imagination may be fired from anything they hear. They may say, ‘I can imagine a world where I’m not using, where I’m not living on the streets.’ Then it goes from imagination to desire. We’re trying to create a space where it’s creative, where people can go deeper.”
By Rick DelVecchio
From September 18, 2009 issue of Catholic San Francisco.
