Categories: New York City, Member News
08.02.2016
Ellen Baxter speaks about creating humane environments for people living with mental health challenges.
Tenants gathered in front of the building that would become their new home and BHC's fifth development, The Rio, at 10 Ft. Washington Avenue, during the renovation process that created 75 studios and 7 family apartments, circa 1989. (Ms. Baxter is in the red sweater).
On July 1, 2016 the life and work of Ellen Baxter, Founder and CEO of Broadway Housing Communities, were featured on NPR’s Invisibilia in an episode by reporter Lulu Miller, who introduced the episode by discussing her family’s experience with mental illness. Just as Miller discussed the challenges in having a mentally-ill older sister, so did Ms. Baxter discuss similar experiences growing up with a mother living with mental illness and addictions.
Ms. Baxter’s story is a moving first-person exploration of the path her life and career took in searching for more humane treatment alternatives for families and individuals living with mental health issues. She spoke about studying psychology at Bowdoin College and having a professor’s support in getting placed (under false pretenses, putting on her best ‘depressed face’) in a mental ward for a week where she was eager to see what treatments were working – and disheartened by her growing realization that there were no effective treatments, that patients were overmedicated to the point of unrecognizability, and spent the days watching television, or looking out the windows and waiting for the bells to ring. She described the stultifying atmosphere: “One can almost see the humanity of people evaporating.”
Ms. Baxter was convinced that there had to be a better way. She haunted the library looking for alternatives, and hit upon a small town named Geel (pronounced with a guttural ‘h’ as ‘Hale’) where, as a book described it, “At the village of Geel in Belgium, it was well-known that the insane have been placed under the management of the villagers.” The town had pioneered a model of family foster care, that has continued to develop over the years, in which families host strangers who are called ‘boarders’ or ‘guests’ who have mental health diagnoses (of which the families are given no details).
Why Geel? Lore has it that St. Dymphna, the patron saint of the mentally ill, was martyred on the spot where Geel is located nearly a thousand years ago, and that in 1300, a church was built on her burial place, which attracted pilgrims seeking a cure for their mental illnesses. And so over centuries, the town became unusually comfortable hosting individuals with these challenges. By 1930, 25% of all residents in Geel had a mental health diagnosis.
Baxter was awarded a one year Watson Fellowship to go to Geel to find out how this model worked, after which she returned to New York City.
What is most remarkable in Geel is perhaps the longevity of these relationships that begin with strangers: the average length of stay with a family in Geel is 28 years; a third of all people with mental health diagnoses who are placed with foster families in Geel stay with them over 45 years.
Ms. Miller quotes Ms. Baxter’s observation that while the medical care in place in Geel is crucial, “When it comes to the day in and day out care that families are often more capable than professionals, that their hands have a healing touch in part because they aren't bound by the rules and they aren't blinded by diagnosis, but most important because they have let go of the mission to cure.”
Despite various setbacks along the way in adopting a model from a Belgian village to one of the biggest and most densely populated cities in the world, Ms. Baxter used her insights from Geel to help inform the movement that would come to be known as supportive housing, along with insights she gleaned from other founders including Father John Felice and Father John McVean of St. Francis Friends of the Poor.
The Network caught up with Ms. Baxter on July 18th to talk about other key experiences that informed her work creating our supportive housing movement.
Ms. Baxter began working for the Community Service Society after returning from Geel. In 1979, she began researching and writing the landmark report (co-authored with Kim Hopper) “Private Lives/Public Spaces: Homeless Adults on the Streets of New York City,” that was published two years later, as the movement to deinstitutionalize patients from ‘insane asylums’ gained ground and thousands of people with mental health issues found themselves with no place to go. Ms. Baxter and Mr. Hopper spoke with these individuals where they lived: on park benches, at the Port Authority bus terminal, riding the subways all night -- before the Callahan ‘Right to Shelter’ decision – when there were just 37 beds available for all homeless women in NYC, and when, according to Martin Begun of NYU, 35-55 people every night were coming into the morgue, dying from exposure.
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The experience of seeing the explosion of homelessness and human suffering on the streets of NYC, and her positive experience in Geel both contributed to Ms. Baxter’s commitment to finding a more humane alternative. In 1983, Baxter founded one of the City’s oldest nonprofit supportive housing providers, Committee for The Heights Inwood Homeless (the original name of Broadway Housing Communities), now home to 7 affordable and supportive housing residences in West Harlem and Washington Heights. Ms. Baxter’s understanding evolved over time – initially, it was taboo to mix homeless individuals and homeless families, especially when mental illness was part of the mix – but with BHC’s fifth building, The Rio, their first attempt to mix these groups, it became evident that “families with children enriched and normalized a building in a very natural fashion.” Now integration -- of families and single individuals, of people with mental health challenges with others, formerly homeless individuals with low-income members of the community -- is the norm for BHC.
It was while being interviewed by Ms. Miller that Ms. Baxter realized the astounding and life-changing success of the model to which she contributed so much: there are many tenants who have been living happily in BHC’s residences for over 20 years. Baxter says “supportive housing can work in so many different forms, there’s no one perfect model. The need for significantly more housing for individuals and families with mental health challenges is so great: thousands of people with mental illness are still quartered in jails, shelters, ER rooms.”
Thank you, Ms. Baxter and Broadway Housing Communities, for the vision of a more humane New York that you have brought to fruition through decades of committed work! The supportive housing community is indebted to you.
Above photo: Ellen Baxter and Jack Langford sitting on the stoop of BHC's first building--and Jack's home--The Heights, 530 W. 178th St., circa 1986.