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Faith-Driven Program Continues to Build on 40 Years of Service
Printed 1/26/04
Publisher: The Roundtable on Religion and Social Welfare Policy
By: Clare Hughes, Roundtable Correspondent
Susie Ross remembers the moment she began believing in God. She was in jail for the 20th time or so, convicted for selling drugs again. That's when she saw Father Peter Young on videotape. The Catholic priest seemed to talk about Ross' own life in his description of addiction and his approach to treating it, she said.
Seeing this man with the collar, talking to people -- he understood," said Ross, now 38, clean and sober, and the manager of housekeeping at the Schuyler Inn, a hotel and conference center that also serves as a job-training facility for former inmates who are recovering from addictions. Young's comprehension of Ross' troubles convinced her that God exists.
"I never believed that before," she said. "I feel like He's working through him."
Ross is among many whose tale of recovery through Young's program includes some aspect of spiritual development. Faith helped forge the conglomeration of services that Young has developed over 40 years, beginning with a shelter he established while pastor of a church in Albany's South End, one of the city's poorest neighborhoods. And it is seen as a key to recovery for some 3,000 alcoholics and drug addicts now participating in programs operated by Peter Young Housing Industries and Treatment (PYHIT) -- though Young does not believe in proselytizing or encouraging adherence to a particular religion.
Yet when asked whether PYHIT should be called a "faith-based organization" -- the broad term the Bush Administration has given religious groups it is encouraging to provide more social services --Young was not immediately certain. The priest started his work with alcoholics and drug addicts under the auspices of the Catholic Church, but spun off the organization early on, at the request of church officials. Since then, PYHIT has developed a non-denominational approach to spirituality, in the tradition of Alcoholics Anonymous.
"We've never used it," Young said when asked if he called his group a "faith-based organization." He added that the Bush Administration's "Faith-Based Initiative" remains unclear to him, even though he was among dozens of religious leaders to attend meetings at the invitation of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives in the early days of the office's formation.
"I'm confused by Faith-Based right now," Young said. "I'm absolutely confused. I don't know where it's going to go and what's going to happen."
What Young is clear about is his mission.
At 73, he energetically leads an organization with more than 50 programs, 45 sites, 250 employees and a $18 million annual budget. On a recent January morning, he fielded cell-phone calls while giving a PowerPoint presentation on his laptop computer on a table at the Capitol Hill Deli in Albany. The deli is a PYHIT eatery which opened last year and employs former inmates who are working to stay clean and sober. The restaurant is adjacent to a modest, donated row house where Young has an office in the basement, giving him quick access to the State Capitol and lawmakers.
After the presentation -- and a quick pitch for the deli's catering services ("I'll get my commercial in," he said) -- Young led a group to a handful of PYHIT sites scattered around Albany County. They included a treatment clinic, a temporary housing program, a convenience store, and a hotel -- where staff and program participants greeted him with smiles and hugs. He seemed to know everyone's story, and acknowledged each one with a pat on the back or a squeeze of the arm, sometimes accompanied by a gentle jest.
In introducing the director of one of PYHIT's programs and calling him by a nicname, Young said, "this guy's had his picture taken before." Then he paused, grabbed the man by the shoulders and delivered the punch line: "In Attica." The two men laughed heartily at the joke.
When Young set up his first shelter in Albany in the late 1950s, he frequently found himself in court advocating to keep drunken residents out of jail. Two local attorneys got to know him, and saw he needed some help caring for alcoholics. They sent him to visit Sister Ignatia Gavin in Ohio, who started the first hospital-based rehabilitation program based on the principles of Alcoholics Anonymous.
Since then, Young has viewed alcoholism as a disease, and is credited with changing the law that put intoxicated people in jail rather than treatment programs. He has also maintained the AA view of spirituality as a key to recovery, in addition to medical treatment.
"In all our programs, we're talking spirituality," Young said.
Young's early work sheltering Albany residents with alcohol and drug problems was clearly "faith-based," he said, operating through St. Joseph's Church, where he was pastor. He would take a van emblazoned with the church's name through the South End, picking up people too drunk to get off the street by themselves.
After the van picked up a state Assemblyman who later charged the action could harm his reputation, church officials became nervous about lawsuits, Young said. They supported his work by freeing him from other pastoral assignments, but asked him to continue his work under his own name, he said.
Young gradually began developing programs to
address different facets of treating alcoholism and substance abuse. As the
programs grew, the priest took on work with incarcerated alcoholics and drug
addicts, initiating an Alcohol and Substance Abuse Treatment program there.
After working for 15 years in the New York state prison system, from 1977-92, he
became convinced that addicts leaving jail needed more than a treatment program
to stay clean and sober -- they needed jobs and housing to build new lives. So
he established PYHIT with a "three-legged stool" approach to recovery:
treatment, housing and employment.
Another central component to Young's approach is the use of "wounded healers" --
people who have struggled with addictions themselves and straightened their
lives out, not unlike the mentors who are partnered with newcomers to AA. They
include people like Lisa Brown, 40, who has overcome addictions and repeated
imprisonment to coordinate a PYHIT welfare-to-work program, where she helps
people who are HIV-positive get back to work.
"It opens the door of dialogue," Young said of staffing his organization with "wounded healers." "You don't sit in some bureaucratic office and do an intake."
Some people -- about 53 percent of participants -- come to the organization from prison, and participation is sometimes a condition of their release. Others hear about Young's programs through word of mouth. PYHIT offers them the incentives of low rent and work -- especially for those whose limited skills and spotty resumes make them unlikely to find jobs elsewhere. They get jobs in one of the organization's own companies, which include restaurants, cleaning services and an embroidery business that puts logos on caps and t-shirts.
In exchange, they must participate in their recovery as wounded healers and members of "Recovery Tenants Associations" -- groups of participants who support and monitor each other in shared housing. Spiritual development is encouraged, but never required, Young said.
It's important for the program to remain non-denominational because participants come from many varied religious backgrounds, Young explained. Religion isn't preached, and a staff member's faith is not considered in hiring decisions, he said.
Still, the AA 12-step model of recovery, with its emphasis on spiritual development and reliance on the belief in a "higher power," forms the basis for treatment programs operated by PYHIT. Some clients participate in PYHIT's own certified treatment programs, while other are directed to outside programs, including but not limited to AA. Robert Ward, PYHIT board chairman, said most program participants view their recovery as a spiritual journey.
"When you're talking to people in the program -- they do look at this as a spiritual thing," Ward said.
Ross, who traces her belief in God to seeing Young on video, said she does not consider herself part of a particular religion, but she now reads the Bible every day. Zenious Godfrey, 45, who now supervises PYHIT's cleaning service contracts with state offices, converted from Baptist to Catholic after Young's program convinced him of the Catholic Church's good work in the community.
"I don't push it on anybody, but without the faith, you're just heading down a dark road," Godfrey said.
Program participant Lance Davis, on the other hand, is among those who dismisses the role of faith in his recovery. "I believe in God," he said, "but that didn't help me when I had my addiction."
In addition to recognizing that participants approach spirituality differently, Young's decision to remain non-denominational is pragmatic: His programs receive government funding, including some reimbursement from Medicaid, and he has long understood that if he accepts taxpayers' money, he must accept certain rules, including those that prohibit proselytizing and require reporting on how the money was spent. At meetings of religious leaders hosted during the first months of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, Young recounted that he was surprised to hear groups lobby for the right to take federal funds without supervision by federal officials.
"I'm saying, 'If you're taking money from the government, don't you have to be accountable?'" Young said.
Young is keeping an eye on the Faith-Based Initiative. Pursuing "faith-based opportunities" is among his strategies for addressing the economic challenges that PYHIT faces. Though the organization manages to break even by using its profit-making enterprises (such as its cleaning service) to subsidize money losers (like housing), the financial challenges can be daunting. Although some 84 percent of PYHIT clients' are treated through government-financed programs, counties often deny Medicaid payment for treatment of residents outside their borders. For example, at one Albany County residential program, PYHIT is currently receiving Medicaid reimbursement for just six of 30 patients, requiring the organization to absorb the costs of treating the others.
To partly address the Medicaid payment issue, PYHIT is looking to expand into New York City, where many of its participants come from. The organization has already established a homeless shelter in Brooklyn, as well as a clinic and a housing program in Queens. It is also considering the purchase of property for more housing in Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood.
The need for substance abuse treatment services is so great in the New York metropolitan area that Young sees limitless potential for expansion -- if he can find the resources.
"When we're talking about developing services, the door's wide open," he said.