What is being described as a clubhouse model may be one answer to a need for services in the Woodstock area. As part of a Woodstock Chamber of Commerce & Arts Community Soundboard series, Hudson Valley Clubhouse executive director Blaise Sackett, program director Sarah Santos, and members Sarah Kadish and Jeffrey Martell recently explained how Woodstock could benefit from the model.
“We know that there’s a lot of conversation and worry and concern and care about our local community members,” Woodstock Chamber co-president Rachel Marco-Havens said, “and it’s particularly shown itself in a conversation around a warming center.”
Woodstock is not unique in not having a municipally run warming center. The only one in this county that is municipally run is in Kingston, and it’s regional.
“A lot of people were upset with [town supervisor] Bill [McKenna] after he very graciously offered what was available at the time to him — the town-hall vestibule,” Marco-Havens said. “We all know it wasn’t appropriate, but the fact that people got to sleep there was huge, and unfortunately that is no longer available for different circumstantial reasons, and that has caused a lot of people in this town to raise their voice, raise their hearts, and start to think about what I’m calling activated community care.”
Sackett grew up on Orchard Lane in Woodstock, where his mother worked at the library and his father ran an antiquarian bookstore.
“It felt like a welcoming community. It was a place that was, I used to say, the freest place, the most beautiful place,” he said. “Everybody was accepted. People were cared for. People were looked after, welcomed. It sort of brought in this whole idea of what is normal and ideas about disability and what is different. It was really just a celebration of diversity and difference and welcoming supportiveness.”
Sackett lived in New York City for decades. He founded a non-clinical, egalitarian model of mental—l health care called The Clubhouse. There are now 370 clubhouses in 30 countries.
Sackett moved to New Paltz. A year ago, he helped start the Hudson Valley Clubhouse in Poughkeepsie.
“All the needs people have, homelessness, lack of resources, incarceration, psychiatric hospitalization, heavy substance-use, people just have been floundering, searching for some home and then when people find it, it’s all harkening back to the Woodstock that I grew up in because it is the same kind of environment,” Sackett said.
Governor Kathy Hochul has proposed spending $8.5 million on up to seven clubhouses in upstate New York.
“There’s been a lot of support in New York City but never upstate,” Sackett said, “so the Office of Mental Health now, for the first time, is putting some money into the model and we’re the only one of those seven possible clubhouses that already exists for a year.”
Community reachout
Sarah Kadish, the first member of Hudson Valley Clubhouse, lived in Woodstock for five years before moving to Poughkeepsie. The clubhouse there now has about 130 members.
“I understand the importance of reaching out to people in a small community who seem to be wandering around, not looking like there’s a care in the world, but there is an invisible need and an invisible struggle, because I felt that very same thing,” Kadish said.
Around age 20, she was hospitalized for mental illness, and after that she spent some time in Woodstock.
“I’m just wandering around the streets — Bearsville, Woodstock, Mill Hill Road,” she said, “but wherever I walked, I just felt I need to connect with people here, because I felt like there was something different about me — like I had my whole life — and there’s all these creatives. At the heart, I’m a creative too, but I’m just not connecting.”
She discovered a clubhouse was in the works in Poughkeepsie.
“Circumstances led to other circumstances, and I ended up moving to Poughkeepsie to be part of the clubhouse,” Kadish said. “Hudson Valley Clubhouse is a therapeutic working community, which is strengths-based, which means that even if an individual is struggling with a need, and it could be a need as acute as housing, or food insecurity, or substance use, or just plain psychotic disorder, any kind of mental illness that basically makes it hard to sort of exist viably in a community where your needs aren’t even known or connected with by everybody around you.”
Members are 18 and older, and live with serious mental illness, but the clubhouse is not a hospital environment.
“We’re not patients who might be a list of symptoms in a chart,” Kadish explained. “We’re not clients. And we have an intentionally small staff, and we all work side-by-side, just as we’re sitting side-by-side here now, so that every member who brings a strength, a talent, even like a just innate spirit to the community learns to grow strong.”
The goal is recovery, “which actually looks different for each one of us.’
Kadish’s horizons included studying graphic design at Dutchess Community College.
Structure and routine
To bring routine and structure into members’ lives, the clubhouse has work-order days, where jobs are grouped into tasks and projects based on strengths and interests.
Members utilize the clubhouse in a variety of ways to fit their needs. While it is open Monday through Friday 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., attendance is not mandatory. People are able to participate in daily tasks and activities, regardless of how they’re feeling that day, said Santos, the program director.
“The way in which we facilitate that is by breaking our projects down into the smallest components possible. So we have social media that we work on, we have our website, we’re working on a podcast, the monthly newsletter,” Santos said. “All of the tasks that it takes to put those media projects together, we break into really small parts. So for social media, writing a caption, taking pictures, and doing the post are three separate tasks, which sounds really simple, but it’s really helpful to be able to have meaningful work for people to engage in, even if they’re having a really hard day.”
Santos, who herself lives with mental illness, said she has always thought meaningful work was a big resiliency factor.
To facilitate those who work, the clubhouse is open one night a week until 7 p.m., where staff and members discuss job issues and help people get connected with continuing education.
“People ask what a typical day is like at the clubhouse, and you could be having an immigration appointment in the morning, you’re cooking lasagna for lunch, you’re helping someone else get onto SNAP or food stamps, putting together a literary and arts magazine, and closing out having some legislators join to do advocacy and talk about mental health programs,” Santos said. “We also have a lot of fun at the clubhouse. We do social programming, so we’ll open at least one weekend a month, where people can just come, play music, play games, do art, usually I bake a lot. And we take field trips.”
It was a big year for Jeffrey Martell, thanks to support from the clubhouse. He was coming of Clozapine, an antipsychotic, when he met Sackett at a gym in Poughkeepsie.
“Other than just forming all the amazing, beautiful relationships that I’ve formed, that have really, and will, for was and is to come, it’s going to change the course of my life, and it’s continuing every day, and it just makes me want to keep coming back as much as I can,” Martell said.
He has become a certified tourism ambassador for Dutchess County Tourism, and hopes that experience will lead to a job. He’s recording a tour of the Walkway Over the Hudson for a podcast.
If the funding stays in the state budget, organizations can respond to a request for proposals and anyone can apply, Sackett said. Kingston could be the next logical location.
“The reason we have a strong interest in Kingston is because we have so many connections there,” he said. The state Office of Mental Health is interested in establishing clubhouse where they are needed, he said.
A Woodstock clubhouse?
Hudson Valley Clubhouse’s budget was $300,000 this first year, including salaries for Sackett, Santos and two part-time workers. By next year, Sackett is aiming for a bigger budget. $700,000 to $1 million budget if funding stays intact. He said Sackett said a working group could form a satellite clubhouse that is connected to one in Kingston.
Marco-Havens said a smaller clubhouse could be started in Woodstock tailored to the community’s unique needs. It would collaborate with a larger center in Kingston, which has access to a broader array of services.
Clubhouse International, the umbrella support organization, provides startup training and explains requirements of becoming an accredited clubhouse.
Sackett invites visitors to the Hudson Valley Clubhouse, 98 Cannon Street, Poughkeepsie. It is open Monday through Friday 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Call 845-803-7846 or go to hvclubhouse.org for information.
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