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About Us
Laurel House is a self-help organization, jointly operated by men and women with mental
illness and a caring professional staff. The program is based on the “Clubhouse model,”
pioneered by Fountain House in New York City, and has operated
in the Stamford area
since 1984.
The emphasis at Laurel House is on recovery. Although more than
four-fifths of our members have been diagnosed with schizophrenia,
bipolar disorder or major depression, we believe that people can
and do recover from the worst effects of serious mental illness.
Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary defines recovery as “the regaining of or the possibility of regaining something lost or taken away.” A young adult diagnosed with a serious mental illness will experience symptoms that can lead to unemployment, disrupted education, homelessness, loss of social ties and a lifelong reliance on medication. Serious mental illness results in higher rates of suicide, drug and alcohol abuse, obesity, diabetes and nicotine addiction. It can also result in a soul-crushing loss of self-esteem, apathy and despair.
Laurel House restores hope by giving people a chance to regain what was lost: employment, education, housing, companionship, health, ties to their community. Self-respect.
The Work-Ordered Day at Laurel House
Recovery begins with relationships and meaningful, productive activity. All of the programs and services of Laurel House originate in the Units. Each Unit is the home base for a group of members and staff, who work together on a specific area of the Clubhouse operations: preparing meals in our Third Floor Unit, answering phones and producing a daily newsletter in our Communications Unit, providing housing support through the Housing Unit and jobs through the Employment Unit.
Like all good workplaces, the Units are a place where relationships
are formed and people join together in a common mission which gives
them purpose and a sense of accomplishment. The focus is on work,
but the goal is recovery. The Unit routines help members develop
positive work habits and build new skills. More importantly, they
provide them with opportunities to feel that they are capable,
productive individuals, valued for what they can do and appreciated
for who they are.
Other Programs
The work in the Units is voluntary. For those who are interested in paid employment, there are a range of placement and support options available through the Employment Unit. There is also a Supported Education program to help people succeed in college or other post-secondary education and several Supportive Housing programs to end homelessness and help people maintain stable, safe, affordable housing.
Our new Wellness initiative
helps people lose weight and improve their health through nutritional
counseling, or quit smoking through our smoking cessation program.
We also have a food co-op that distributes hundreds of bags of
groceries a year for the nominal charge of two dollars a bag.
Our Thrift Store at
71 Summer Street is not just a source of income for the Laurel
House programs. It also provides volunteering options for our members
in a community-based business and is a supplier of furnishings
for the supported housing programs.
For more information on programs & services...
About the Clubhouse Model
The term “Clubhouse” goes back to the formative days of Fountain
House, a program in New York City that was started in 1948. Fountain
House was one of the first organizations in the country to use
a rehabilitation approach to mental illness. Originally formed
as a self-help group for people discharged from state psychiatric
facilities, it soon evolved into a community of people working
together with professional staff to achieve the common goal
of
recovery.
The Clubhouse Model, as it came to be known, is based on the premise
that the goal of recovery is best served when people have the opportunity
to form relationships and engage in meaningful, productive activity
which is needed, expected and valued by others. The distinguishing
characteristic of this model is its insistence that the “members”
of the community—those who have been diagnosed with mental illness—work
together with professional staff, side-by-side, as peers and partners,
in every function of the clubhouse operation.
In 1977, Fountain House was awarded a multiyear grant from the National
Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) to establish a national training
program on the Clubhouse Model. A subsequent grant from the Robert
Wood Johnson Foundation, and other leading foundations, launched
The National Clubhouse Expansion Project, which resulted in the
successful replication of the model in hundreds of new “Clubhouses”
throughout the world, including Laurel House in 1984. An offshoot
of this project was the establishment of the bi-annual International
Seminar on the Clubhouse Model. At the fifth such seminar, held
in St. Louis in 1989, more than 600 participants from clubhouses
around the world codified a set of standards for the model, the International
Standards for Clubhouse Programs. Today there are more than
400 clubhouses on every continent around the world which strive
to implement these 36 standards that define what a clubhouse is
and does.
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