Health awareness group helps thousands cope every year
By Eliza Ridgeway, Town Crier Staff Writer
 Stephanie Giddings, director of CHAC’s New Outlooks program, chats with a client. photos by joe hu/town crier |
One day last week, Karen Friedman, a Community Health Awareness Council intern, was working at Kenneth N. Slater Elementary School in Mountain View. A boy had been taken out of class after some bad behavior, and the teacher asked Friedman if she could help. Friedman spent several hours with the child.
“Since I didn’t have a relationship with the boy, I just got to know him, talking about his family, things that were hard for him,” she said.
Sometimes, in such situations, all that is needed is asking questions of the child and drawing him out, she said.
“They need to have somebody really listen to them,” Friedman said. “Having a bad feeling about someone else isn’t bad by itself, being angry or sad isn’t bad. We teach them how to deal with those feelings in a way that doesn’t get them into trouble.”
Friedman, who has a master’s degree in counseling psychology, is part of a Community Health Awareness Council (CHAC) program that offers counseling in each of the 23 public schools in Los Altos and Mountain View, including Bullis Charter School.
Founded in 1973 by parents and community leaders, the council was a grass-roots group that worked with Los Altos, Los Altos Hills, Mountain View and their school districts to serve students. The cities and school districts provided all of CHAC’s initial $40,000 budget.
Today, the organization has a staff of 45, with more than 50 interns. The cities’ and school districts’ contributions currently make up only 11 percent of the annual revenue. CHAC raised $1,841,115 in 2004-2005, most of it through individual and corporate donations, government grants and in-kind gifts of supplies and volunteer time. It served 2,640 parents and children with 25,184 hours of treatment. Eighty-six percent of the program’s revenue goes directly to services, and more than half of the families served are low or very-low income. Fees are set on a sliding scale according to ability to pay.
“We meet needs for so many people who might never be reached otherwise,” said Monique Kane, executive director.
Counseling also is available outside of school for students, families and seniors. Staffers are on call nights and weekends, ready to respond to police requests for help with family disputes. When a crisis such as a death occurs in a school, CHAC can flood a campus with counselors.
“One of the things so unique about CHAC is that it responds to the needs of the community year by year,” Kane said.
This year, increased concern about bullying in the schools led CHAC to put together presentations to parents and teachers. Counselors worked throughout the spring with bullies and their victims, leading students in making individualized squares for a friendship quilt. The “Friendship Campaign” wrapped up at Castro and Slater elementary schools last week with a schoolwide strawberry shortcake festival.
CHAC saw 187 clients last week in addition to maintaining the school programs - a feat made possible by the scores of therapists in the unpaid internship program. The program’s reputation draws students from all over the country to complete their 3,000 required training hours.
The agency long ago outgrew its converted duplex in downtown Mountain View. Almost every staff office is commandeered for sessions. Therapy rooms include a converted bathroom and a converted closet.
“We thought it would be claustrophobic,” Kane said of the walk-in closet, now outfitted with a child-size table and toys. “But the children seem to love it.”
Art therapists painted a seaside scene on the walls of the converted bathroom, now a play therapy room. Baskets of animal figures and board games line one wall next to a table of sand, which makes a good play landscape.
Play and art therapy can create communication between a child and therapist, Kane said.
“Art is a universal language, even for children without English language skills,” she said. “In art, feelings come out - you don’t even need words.”
Play therapy, which focuses on activities rather than conversation, can be particularly helpful for younger children who can’t easily discuss their feelings, Kane said. Learning to express feelings often leads to finding ways of handling them.
Play mixes with education in many of the agency’s programs. Associate clinical services director Betty Mackey founded A Place for Girls, a support group for fifth to eighth-grade girls, after reading “Reviving Ophelia,” Mary Pipher’s seminal text on the teen girls’ problems. Mackey also created a similar program for both genders, A Place for Kids, because she wanted “kids to realize that they are not alone in this world with their problems,” she said.
Participants can raise issues and ask questions in a safe, sympathetic peer group, headed by two intern therapists. At the A Place for Girls meeting last week, the poignant and comedic mixed as giggling, chatting and poking accompanied more serious conversation about eating disorders among students from Loyola, Oak and Covington elementaries and Sunnyvale Middle School.
Briana, a brunette with blue Hawaiian flowers on her sweatshirt, joked that after she’d said the previous week that she wanted to be anorexic, she went home and ate “three gallons of ice cream.” The preteens’ squirming energy tumbled into controlled mayhem as the group made decorative soaps, arguing over and collaborating on recipes and color mixing.
Another program, the Blossom Project, began seven years ago in response to the area’s high number of teen pregnancies. Parents from Los Altos and Mountain View High schools who had children at a very early age came together to create a performance for local schools. In the performance, they shared their love for their children but also discussed the painful consequences of teen parenthood.
Prevention Plus offers counseling to students on issues ranging from shyness to substance abuse.
Nearly 400 students participated last year in another program, Just for Kids. Aimed at second- and third-graders, the program meets during the lunch hour to discuss self-esteem, lifestyle choices and drugs and alcohol abuse.
The Restorative Justice Program is a co-effort with the Santa Clara County Juvenile Probation Office, a diversion program for young people who have committed misdemeanors. Staffers organize counseling, support and education groups that address substance abuse, property damage and violence. Misdemeanor offenders often are sentenced to community service rather than jail time or probation, and the Restorative Justice Program partners with local non-profits to find community work for its youth.
“A lot of non-profit agencies like having our kids,” program director Diana Ritter said. The Los Altos Kiwanis Club gives program students work at the Kiwanis Christmas tree lot and at the club’s annual Pet Parade.
High school students who need treatment for drug and alcohol abuse can join New Outlooks, an outpatient program of counseling and education. Group counseling offers education on the physical effects, consequences and cost of drugs and alcohol, and helps students develop clean and sober activities.
“Drug use usually involves friends, social life and escape and coping mechanisms,” program director Stephanie Giddings said. “It can be terrifying (without drugs) - what am I going to do now, how am I going to deal?”
Another of CHAC’s programs is Outlet, which supports lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and questioning youth. Outlet offers support groups, mentoring, counseling, youth-leadership training, school workshops and other resources. In the group-mentoring program, teens gather twice a month to spend time with adult volunteers from the gay community.
“The real purpose is to give the youth a picture of what their life can look like as an adult,” program director Shannon Turk said. One of the primary reasons gay or questioning youth feel isolated, depressed and disconnected is that “in the media and the world, they don’t see what their life can look like,” she said. “The mentors offer a glimpse of what it’s like to be an adult in a supportive community.”
Outlet does its own fund raising through donations, grants and the annual Out to Eat fund-raiser. Outlet also provides training for school staff and community groups creating an open environment for all students - addressing sexism, racism and religious bias as well as gender and sexuality issues.
Next year, CHAC will begin a first-5 program, targeting children in their first five years of life, using funding from state tobacco taxes. The non-profit has never focused on such a young population before, and the group will work with the neediest parents with young children to develop new ways to respond to their family’s needs, said associate clinical director Mary White.
“We’re ever-changing, and yet we still deliver the basic services,” White said. “And we never turn anyone away for lack of money. We just don’t.”
The Blossom Project for educating teens about early pregnancy is collecting donations for a benefit rummage sale June 24-25. They can be dropped off at the CHAC office, 711 Church St., Mountain View.
For more information, call 965-2020 or visit www.chacmv.org.
