Joel Corcoran: Welcome, Needed, and Valued: The Clubhouse Approach

Welcome to Why Not Me the World? Podcast hosted by
Tony Mantor, broadcasting from Music City USA, Nashville, Tennessee. Join
us as our guests tell us their stories. Some will
make your laugh, some will make you cry. Real life
people who will inspire and show that you are not
alone in this world. Hopefully you gain more awareness, acceptance,
and a better understanding for autism around the world. Hi,
I'm Tony Mantor. Welcome to Why Not Me the World?
Humanity over Handcuffs the Silent Crisis a share event. Today
we join by Joel Corcoran, executive director and CEO of
Clubhouse International, a global network of over three hundred and
seventy clubhouses across thirty two countries. Clubhouse International provides individuals
living with mental illness a supportive community, offering opportunities for friendship, employment, housing,
education and access to medical and psychiatric services, and a caring,
safe environment. Joel is here to share insights about this
transformative organization. Thanks for coming on. Sure, could you give
us an overview of your organization, your responsibilities and the
goals you have.
I'm the director of the CEO Clubhouse International and Clubhouse
International is an organization that is committed to ending isolation
both economic and social, for people living with mental illness,
and particular people living with serious mental illness. And the
way that we do that is by helping to grow
the number and the quality of clubhouse rehabilitation programs, a
rebuilding program called clubhouse. A clubhouse is intentional community. It's
a voluntary place where people live with mental illness. Again,
by and large, people with serious mental illness, but anybody
with a history of mental illness is welcomed. It's designed
to be a community that is rich with opportunities for
people to rebuild their lives and reclaim their futures after
having them so dramatically disrupted by an illness. People living
with mental illness are typically separated from many of the
things we all take for granted. They get marginalized, and
they've usually not finished school, but not always. They've had
their early lives interrupted. In most cases, they lose family,
they lose friends, they lose access to employment or money,
and a lot of times maybe the worst thing is
they lose hope for the future. So the clubhouse is
this place where people who are typically not welcomed in
other places are not only welcomed but they're welcomed and
needed and given repeated opportunities to participate, paid to engage
with others to rebuild social networks. But the Clubhouse it's
more than that. It's an opportunity system. So people when
they come to us, they're usually not at their best.
They've usually been dealing with the difficulties of mental illness
in many different ways, and when they come to us,
they're looking for help, and they're looking for a place
to be safe and welcomed, and we provide that. That's
really important.
Yes, that sounds really good. What else do you help
them with?
Beyond that? The Clubhouse provides so many opportunities that help
people rebuild their lives. First and foremost, it's a comfortable
place to be. You can come in and just have
a cup of coffee if you want to, just talk
to somebody, or just sit if you want to. You
can also get help accessing needed services healthcare, mental health care,
social services. While the Clubhouse doesn't provide any kind of
a treatment or clinical services, it certainly helps community. Helps
each member, that's what we call people who come to
Clubhouse as members. Helps each member access any kind of
healthcare or social services they need with that's finding a
psychiatrist or a therapist, or maybe it's getting primary care
physician or getting access to housing. You can get that
kind of help in a clubhouse. In addition to that,
the clubhouse again as a community of people. So when
you bring people together, there's a lot of work to do.
You have to answer the phones, you have to keep
the place clean, you have to feed people, you have
to plan and organize everything. So there's always work to
be done at a clubhouse. So members are given the
opportunity to participate in that work as much as they
want to or as little as they want to.
Do you find the participation to be good with all
the members.
Many times people living with mental illness are happy to
be given the opportunity to contribute to others or to
an organization. Again, that's an important part of coming and
belonging somewhere. Even beyond that, the clubhouse has this opportunity
system that helps people return to education, whether that be
basic adult education, college university certificate degree, or advanced degree programs.
Whatever the person's goals are, the clubhouse will support that
person both at the clubhouse or on campus if needed
and wanted. In addition to that. The clubhouse is an
extraordinary employment program people living with mental illness. In this country,
there's ut employer raised. About eighty five percent or fifteen
percent of people living in mental illness are employed at
our clubhouses. About forty percent of the people who participate
at a clubhouse each day are employed in jobs in
the community, integrated into businesses with all kinds of employers,
pay the prevailing wage, and are given the opportunity to
start to build a career and to do things that
they want again. And that's important to a lot of
people living in their owners. If you've talked to folks,
they one of the top two or three life goals
is usually I want to have a job where I'm
getting paid, where I can contribute, where I can do
something important. And so clubhouses have aggressive and successful employment program.
There's also an evening weekend social program to help people
rebuild social connections. When your life gets disrupted by mental illness,
you often lose your friends and your family and your connections.
Far too often people are alone, living an apartment alone,
or living at home with their parents and not able
to come out participate in the world. So having that
social network again is really important, so Tony, when you
say what do we do? We provide this over the
top support for people living with mental illness and give
them repeated opportunities to build success and they recover, and
we do it in a way where we're sharing the work.
There's a small professional staff that works at clubhouses, but
they work as colleagues with members, and members of the
clubhouse people living with mental illness are involved in every
aspect of it. That shared work is what we think
is restorative, and that's the crux of what our program is,
being part of something with other people and contributing to
the success of the group while at the same time
building success for yourself.
How long has the clubhouse been in operation and what's
his history of development and growth.
That's a great question. The clubhouse started in nineteen forty eight,
so over seventy five years ago in Manhattan with a
single clubhouse. A group of people who had been released
from a state psychiatric hospital began to gather in New
York City, where they lived. They recognized each other from
the hospital, and they formed an organization to help each other.
They didn't want it to sound like a psychiatric program
and did the stigma associated with that, so they called
it the WANNA Society wa NA, and that stood for
we Are Not Alone, and the concept was we're stronger
and more likely to build success when we're working together
rather than going in alone. They formed this club, the Society,
which eventually, with the help of some wealthy volunteers were
committed to helping this group of people. They bought a
building that had a fountain in the backyard and they
renamed themselves Fountain House. Founded House was the first clubhouse
operating on forty seventh Street in Pattan and it's still
there today very successfully. It's the model for all other clubhouses.
That's how it started. It grew over thirty years and
then began to get the attention of other mental health advocates,
both public and private, and began a training program that
was funded by the US government the National Institute for
Mental Health, and began to train other organizations and states
and then eventually outside of the country. When the clubhouse
began to be successful and grew, it was time to
create a second organization, so Fountain House, together with some
of the other clubhouses, created what is now Clubhouse International.
You kind of beat me to the punch, my next
question was is it regional, national, or international? So you've
answered that it's international. So can you expand on how
many there are and where they might be today?
There are three hundred and seventy seven clubhouses in thirty
two countries on all six continents and across six continents.
I should say they're about two hundred and twenty in
the United States and another one hundred and fifty outside
of the United States.
That's great, that's really good to hear. What an impact
you were making. Now are all the clubhouses around the
world modeled in the same way, and of course the
way that they work with the people that are members.
The answer to that is yes. The clubhouse model of
psychosocial rebuiltation is a very specific model. Although the word
clubhouse is general and lots of programmed organizations might say
club or clubhouse, the clubhouse model is very specific. It's
been developed and organized and improved over seventy five years.
The clubhouse operate on the basis of thirty seven best
practice standards, the International Standards for Clubhouse Programs, and these programs,
these standards describe how we work with each other, how
we treat each other, what the opportunity system is in
a clubhouse, how clubhouses are structured, how clubhouses are governed,
what the business of a clubhouse is, and so. These
thirty seven best practice standards were consensually developed by clubhouses,
meaning members, people living with mental illness, staff, people who
volunteer on boards. These standards were developed and they're updated
every two years rather a cumbersome but important process of
seeking consensus about what are the best practices, and they
were first promulgating back in nineteen eighty nine and have
been updated every two year years since then. Clubhouses are
trained on the basis of these standards and evaluated on
the base to these standards. If you go to any
clubhouse in the world, you'll find the standards posted on
the wall or on the tables or part of the
meetings that where people are talking about all the time.
For example, the first standard CLUBUS membership is voluntary and
without time limits. When some of them becomes a member
of a clubhouse, they do it because they want to.
You can't get too sick or too healthy to be
a member the clubhouse. Watching Emple clubhouse, you could always
use that clubhouse, and people do. They use it a
lot when they need it. Most, and they use it
less when they don't need it so much.
When someone says they need help, what's the process to
bring them into your supportive environment and setting up resources
to help them rebuild their life and pursue the vision
they originally had and hopefully can attain again for their future.
There's a clubhouse in Worcester, Massachusetts called the Genesis Club,
and they started as saying a number of years ago
they said, we have wide doors to come in, but
we had even wider doors to go out. And that's
a simple answer to your question. At clubhouses, it's intentionally
very simple and straightforward to become a member. There's no testing,
there's no assessments. You don't have to earn your way
into a clubhouse. You don't have to get the permission
of anybody or any program or anything. If you have
a history of mental illness, you're welcomed into the clubhouse.
So members come to the clubhouse in many different ways.
Some members are referred by a medical professional a psychiatrist
or a therapist or a primary care doctor. Some by
social workers or case managers or school disability offices, and
many members are self preferred, in which you can do
to come to a clubhouse, and it's typically someone else
who had benefit from the clubhouse will tell her about it.
When someone comes to the clubhouse, they might email, they
might come knock on the front door, they might call
by telephone, but they're invited to come for tour. Every
clubhouse runs tours where they introduce people to how the
clubhouse works. They'll walk you through the clubhouse, show you
how it all works. And if you have a history
of mental illness and you're interested in being in a clubhouse,
typically you can become a clubhouse right away, like that
day or that week. It's very easy. There's not waiting
lists typically at clubhouses, and so someone just has to
express an interest in being a member and have a
history of mal illness. To answer your question about getting out,
it's all voluntary, so you can leave any time you want.
You can just paid as much or as little as
you want to. But the systems that I was describing earlier,
going back to school and finishing your education and building
self confidence again and developing a plan for what's next
in terms of a career or a family or where
you want to live. The clubhouse helps with all of
those things. The supported education program at a clubhouse is
designed to meet people where they're at, learn what their
goals are, and then help them access whether it's financial
help for school, whether it's finding the right school, the
right major, getting through a tough class, structural seeking reasonable
accommodation from the school if that's needed. The same thing
is true in employment, over the top support in many
different ways to help members find and then turn to
employment and then be successful in employment and get on
a career path if that's what they want. If someone
has a real problem with homelessness and their housing being
at rista clubhouse will get involved and help people get
that stabilized and figure out what their goals are around
the housing and help them achieve that. So there are
a lot of ways out of the clubhouse in terms
of getting back. The whole mission of clubhouse is to
help people live successfully as integrated and valued members of society.
Are there any accommodations at the clubhouse where if someone
is in dire need of a place to stay that
there's something temporary for him, like if they're going to
school or anything along that line.
Clubhouses are not residential programs, so nobody lives at the
clubhouse clubhouses are very involved with helping members who need
housing get that housing and keep it and improvement. So
they'll run support department programs or work with other housing
programs in the community. If people need that knout so
put that aside. The residential stuff. There's a lot of
help with it. But people don't live at the clubhouse.
Concept that you described of being able to use the
clubhouse while you're going to college, the answer to that
is yes. Think about it like a health club has
all kinds of services. There's cardios, sometimes there's yoga, sometimes
there's a steam room. There might be weightlifting or other
kinds of stretching classes or any of those kind of
there's a lot of things you can do at a
health clubs. When you join, you pick what you want
to use, and you might change your mind. You might
come to the clubhouse a lot, and anytime you might
go a lot because you want to well, you might
just go once in a while. You get to pick
and choose how that works in your life. Members get
to pick and shoes how they use the clubhouse. As
I said, when people first come, typically they're not at
their best. It's pretty common for people to be really
struggling and be separated and isolated and lonely. And sometimes
people will use the clubhouse every day. People when they
go back to school, they may only come in a
couple of times a week to check in with friends
or get help with something, or they may use the
Most clubhouses will have some kind of system to help
with tutoring or studying, but the member will pick what
works for them.
Sure that makes sense. So could you describe when a
member first walks through those doors, what do they see first?
How is the clubhouse laid out? Can you give us
a little bit of a visual on how the clubhouse
is laid out?
Well, that's an interesting question. If you go to any
clubhouse in the world, if you know what a clubhouse is,
and you walk into any clubhouse, you could go to
one in Tokyo or Pristina, Kosovo, or London or Detroit
or Richmond, British Columbia, and you'd know that you were
in a clubhouse, because's a lot of things that are
very similar. But clubhouses might be in a large office
type building, a commercial building. They might be in an
old Victorian home. They're clubhouses that have purchased or lease
buildings formerly used as firehouses or anything, so it can
be any kind of a building. Typically, when you walk
into a clubhouse, there's going to be one or more
people right there at a reception desk or reception area
who are saying Hi, Joel, welcome, welcome to Clubhounds, going
to help you. And that's for two reasons. One is
just to remind people that they are welcome there. It's
a place that they belong. But also it makes sure
that the people who come through the door are people
who get the help that they need, whether it's someone
who's visiting and want to learn about a clubhouse, or
someone who just wants to find out what's going on
in that building, or if it's a potential new member.
So there's somebody right there at the door always who
can help someone. And then the clubhouse space is usually
divided up into sort of the functions of that clubhouse,
how that clubhouse is organizing, and oftentimes that has to
do with the size any clubhouse, you'll find a kitchen
in a dining room, usually a commercial size kitchen, a
clubhouse that has commercial appliances in those kind of things.
The average daily attendance at a clubhouse is around somewhere
between thirty five and forty five people a day, and
some clubhouses have as many as three hundred people a day,
and some clubhos have as few as ten or fifteen
people day, depending on the community and the size of
the community and the age of the clubhouse. At every clubhouse,
you're bringing people together. So there's food service, and so
there's a kitchen in a dining room.
Now what about electronics? Do you have a room focused
on that as well.
As usually some kind of a business or administration or
communications room where people are doing work on computers, maybe
putting out a newsletter, maybe reporting to the funding source
on statistics and things that need to planning the schedule
for the next week. Typically, the clubhouse will be divided
into what we call units. A typical clubhouse has some
kind of a clerical unit, some kind of a food
service unit. Oftentimes clubhouses will have employment or employment education
units that are designed around helping to support people with
education and employment. Clubhouse might have a space that takes
care of the facility, and members gather in those units.
They choose where they want to work. There's a small staff,
so they'll be spread out amongst the units in the
clubhouse and every day during the day, we have what's
called the work order day, So if you came in
between typically nine and five, you'd see people organized around
doing work. If you're in an office based unit, you
have to be doing office work. If you're in a
food service unit to be doing food service. If in
you're a facilities unit, be doing that. There might be
a horror culture unit that's growing food for the clubhouse
and taking care of the landscape and all of that.
So there's voluntary work going on. I remember I said
the work is what is restorative, So people sharing work
and doing it is the concept. So you would see
people working together.
That sounds like a really great environment. If you would
expand on the duties of the staff members and how
they interact with the members.
The role of the staff person in the clubhouse is
to engage members, to get to know them, to build
a relationship with them, and doing that through shared work
is really important. So you'll see people in the kitchen.
You won't see people off in one corner by themselves.
You'll see people working at a table together, sharing the work,
planning the work. If you see a group of people
planning evening and weekend activities for the coming month. They'll
probably sitting around a table together sharing that work. Clubhouses
like to use whiteboards. They put everything out there so
that anybody who comes in can see what's going on
and what work opportunities there are, so you'll see that.
You'll see modern office equipment in our clubhouses. We talk
about making the place image enhancing so it won't look
like or under funded social service program. Most clubhouses will
be the furniture of what's hanging on the walls, the
condition of the building of the property always image enhancing,
it fresh and new and modern. Working with equipment that
they might be working with when they're outemployed. They might
be gaining new skills, so they might the media unit
where many clubhouses do podcasts for example, or make videos
or weekly or daily television shows to keep everybody informed
about what's going on at the clubhouse and what opportunities are.
So you see people working on those kinds of things.
The other thing you'll see is people treating each other
with a tremendous amount of respect and dignity and care.
Because the clubhouses are caring community. It's really very impressive
to see how people treat each other with such positive
regard and make sure that each other is okay, making
sure that people are invited to engage in whatever activity
that's going on there, so you'll see people treating each
other very nice.
That's a really impressive statement. What areas do you usually
find a clubhouse?
When we talk to a new group about building a clubhouse,
we say, you want to have your clubhouse in a
place that is easily accessible, typically people who are members
of clubhouses who are living at or near or below
the poverty line. You want to be where there's public
transportation where people could get there. So we want to
have easy access to employment opportunities. I know I keep
coming back to that, but employment is a cornerstone of
the clubhouse model. We want people to be able to
access employers, so businesses or public services, or we have
folks that are employed in government offices, or in libraries
or at the local big box store, law firms or
accounting office who have people working in jobs where they're
being supported there. So the clubhouse needs to be reasonable
access to those kinds of things. You want it to
be a safe neighborhood. Again, think about the phrase image
enhancing in my work before I became the director of
Clubhouse International. I was involved with opening three different clubhouses.
Their addresses were two to nine Main Street in one city,
five ten Main Street and another city, and forty four
Main Street and another city. So you can see where
I think clubhouses belonged.
Yeah, and that makes great sense. Now that brings up
another question. How long have you been with Clubhouse.
I started in nineteen eighty six working in a clubhouse
in Hyennis, Massachusetts, so I've been doing that. I've been
at Clubhouse International since nineteen ninety five and the Executive
director CEOs since ninety seven.
What are your projections for clubhouses growth and expansion over
the next three to five years. Do you foresee it
becoming significantly larger than it is currently today?
I appreciate that question. For our first thirty years, we
spent a lot of time helping new clubhouses grow and
go and building a training program that you talked about.
EAR is a consistent training program at our twelve training
centers around the world. We also have a quality assurance program.
It's a formal accreditation program. So establishing that and then
building a very tightly knit network of clubhouses across the world.
We spend a lot of time doing that, But as
we approached our thirtieth anniversary, we started thinking, Okay, where
are we going, what's next? Why do we see it going?
And when I say we are board, our staff, our
members and staff were in leadership positions with our organization
from clubhouses around the world. We all could agree on
one thing that there are nearly enough clubhouses in the world.
That the pace with which we're growing, while steady and good,
has been too slow. There are millions and millions of
people who need access to the kind of supportive community
that a clubhouse is in the opportunity system to help
to recover and rebuild their lives. We do not think
that we're going fast enough. So our focus now is
on accelerating the growth and development of clubhouses. And so
while we have three hundred and seventy seven clubhouses today,
we were at three hundred and forty when we were
talking about this, and we're hoping to triple the number
of clubhouses by thirty thirty. Across the world, we are
seeing a growing interest in clubhouses. There's so much evidence
out there supporting clubhouses as an evidence based effective practice.
There are academic studies as well as reports that are
showing that clubhouses reduced the need for use of more
expensive services like hospitals and emergency services or emergency rooms.
They reduce primal justice system involvement for people with mental illness,
increase housing, increase general wellbeing. People living with mental illness
typically die fifteen to twenty years earlier than people without
mental illness, usually because of undiagnosed comorbid health care conditions
that go undiagnosed because a person's mental illness either prevents
them from participating or for reasons of stigma, discrimination, or
maybe fear on the person's partner economics, and so clubhouses
do a lot to help people address those well being
and healthy lifestyle. There's a lot of evidence out there
showing that. So it's a unique time where public and
private mental health advocacy organizations and service organizations are recognizing
the value of clubhouses, and we're getting a lot of
attention that's coming and saying we need clubhouses in our community.
Thirty new clubhouses openly enjoying Clubhouse International last year. We
are working now to accelerate public awareness about what a
clubhouse is, how Clubhouse International works to support clubhouses and
giving communities access to training and information so that they
can start their own clubhouses and join our network of support.
We're optimistic about the future. Our vision is that one
day clubhouses will be as commonplace in the world as
Boys and Girls clubs and YMCA's and senior centers. We
think every community needs a clubhouse, just like those organizations
are needed, and that's what we're working towards.
That sounds really, really good. Now we've covered a lot
of things, But what would you like to tell our
listeners that they need to know that you think is
very important for them to understand about what you're trying
to do with clubhouses around the world.
I think it's a couple of things. I'll do it briefly,
but first I was reading a newsletter this morning. Our
newsletter a member of clubhouse called Mosaic Clubhouse in London.
Her name is Helen. She wrote a little piece in
there describing herself and she talked about being in and
out of hospital from the time she was in her
teens in the early twenties and just feeling completely disconnected
to the world. And she said when she came across
Mosaic Clubhouse that all changed that just being welcome and
being able to use what MOSAA Clubhouse had to offer
at our own pace. I think, she said, I was
able to dip in and dip out as I needed,
and now I'm back on a good path. And she said,
I'm now working again. I said to my said, I
want to tell them Tony about that way I talked
to him, because that's the experience we're talking about here.
So I want people to remember that. There was another
member who told me once a long story about his
life and how his life was disrupted by metals later
in life and he lost a good job and a
home and a family, even though he had been educated
at Yale and Work School of Business. He had to
go home and live with his mother in Milwaukee, and
he lived in his basement for three years, afraid to
come out and to talk to other people. And eventually,
after a lot of encouragement from therapists and supporters, he
tried the local clubhouse, their Grand Avenue club. He said
to me, he said, Joel, I have a message for you.
That's something I hear often. He said to me, this
clubhouse is great for me, and it literally saved my life.
I don't think i'd be here today without it, and
that's very common to hear from Clubhouse members. But he said,
I want to ask you a question. The people were
hanging around bus stations and in street corners, panhandling, are
in homeless enclaves in cities. I said yeah. He said
a lot of those folks have mental health challenges or
metal illnesses. I said yeah. He said those people would
benefit from clubhouses. I said, they sure would. He said
that's not my message to you, though. He said, that's
not where most of us are. Most of us aren't
on the street corners and highly visible. Most of us
are at home in our mother's basement, drinking coffee and
watching TV all day and afraid to come out. Those
are the folks we have to reach. Those are the
people who need to know about clubhouses and benefit from those.
And that's what Clubhouse is trying to do, is trying
to reach all those people.
Can you tell us a little bit about your website
and what they can find on there.
I would encourage people to go to our website and
look at Clubhouse International and see what we do. There's
a directory there. Look for a clubhouse in your community,
and there's opportunities for you to resure people who you
know might benefit from a clubhouse. Go for a tour yourself,
see what the clubhouse is all about. Clubhouses love to
give tours. Maybe volunteer and join the local board or
advisory board. There are a lot of things that you
can do. We have different advocacy actions all day, all
year long. You can get involved with us that way.
We know everybody has a connection to mental illness, whether
it's themselves, their family, their friends, or neighbors, their coworkers,
their roommates. I'd encourage you to get involved, learn about
what a clubhouse can deliver. And maybe the most important
thing to remember is people living withopmental less are, in
fact people with all the same dreams and needs and
wants and the potential to recover and rebuild a personally satisfied, engaged, involved,
contributing life in the local community. Is there. Clubhouses provide
a reasonable accommodation, which is for people with medialists, which
is over the top, support and repeated opportunities to succeed.
I would encourage people to get to know us a
little bit better.
Yes, absolutely, Well, this has been great, great conversation, great information.
Really appreciate you taking the time to come.
On, Tony, I appreciate the opportunity to talk to you
about it. If I can tell you any more, introduce
you to a clubhouse, I'll let you know.
I certainly will. Thanks again, thanks for taking the time
out of your busy schedule to listen to our show today.
We hope that you enjoyed it as much as we
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