This is part 20 of a series. To go back to the very beginning, start with part one. To go back to the start of this section, start with part fifteen.
Visiting Geel, it’s easy to get the impression that the patron saint of Geel is Ellen Baxter. Baxter was born in New York, raised in the Netherlands, and attended university in Maine. Baxter then spent a year in Geel, studying their foster care program. She returned to New York to enroll in a PhD program at Columbia University. Soon, Baxter was conducting interviews of people living on the streets of New York City, resulting in a report published by the Community Service Society of New York, Private Lives/Public Spaces: Homeless Adults on the Streets of New York.
Baxter’s work has had a huge impact on life for people in New York City. In 1979 she was involved with a class action lawsuit against New York City, establishing the city’s duty to provide housing to homeless men. This was expanded to include homeless women in 1982 and families in 1986. Today, New York is one of three cities in the US where everyone has the right to shelter.
Broadway Housing Communities
In 1980, Baxter learned about a supportive housing community run by Franciscan Friars in Chelsea the 1970s. This gave her a model of how supportive housing could look in New York and she moved forward with creating her own community. She founded Broadway Housing Communities (BHC) in 1985. In 2016 BHC had over 600 tenants in seven buildings. BHC provides “permanent housing and social support to people who were homeless, many of whom have neglected physical or mental health needs”.
Payment comes through the same agencies as for other boarders in New York and New Jersey:
“Services for most residents at Broadway Housing are paid for by the state and city of New York and private foundations. Housing is subsidized from the same sources, and many residents, like Kitt, pay their rent from some combination of welfare, Social Security or work income.”
At first I was skeptical that BHC embodied the spirit of Geel, since they build institutional care homes that aim to feel more like a college or assisted living than a mental hospital or rehab center. Eventually I realized that as the friendly face of institutional care, BHC is absolutely the American Geel.
The vision began with Baxter and has been enabled by federal, state, and local funding, private equity, and philanthropic funding. Baxter cleverly worked within the system to create what she felt people needed.
Today’s pilgrims to Geel come not for a cure from Saint Dymphna or a new life with a new community, but to learn about foster care. Notably, no one visiting Geel to study returned home and established an adult foster care system. Rather, they created group homes and supportive housing. Just like Geel has today, using the Wisconsin model of community care.
Geel in America
Geel evangelist Jackie Goldstein provides information on US programs she views as embodying the spirit of Geel in her book, Voices of Hope for Mental Illness: Not Against, With. The programs Goldstein highlights and BHC doubtlessly are essential sources of support for their participants. They don’t strike me as unique when compared to other programs providing housing and support for people who are unable to live independently.
The programs that are said to be the American versions of Geel and programs that are inspired by Geel leave me feeling just as uncomfortable as Geel itself, without the exciting mystery. Reading Goldstein’s book, I was beside myself with frustration that she seemed oblivious to the difference between programs that are led by participants and those which bestowed charitable acts of kindness on the needy. How could she have spent so much time in Geel, spent her whole career studying community care, and not be interested in the difference between these two approaches?
These American programs are based on a vision of how people who need care can live meaningful lives. Most of them are paternalistic. There is an emphasis on preventing homelessness and treating substance abuse disorders. While discussions of life in Geel focus on how boarders are integrated into the family and accepted by the community, American programs focus on removing the chronically homeless from the street by providing permanent housing and on-site services.
Rather than placing people in family homes, they are placed in dormitories, often former SROs, boarding houses, and hotels. Boarders seem to continue to be officially considered homeless (or chronically homeless) even after they are provided with permanent housing, based on the terminology used. As long as someone is being provided permanent housing through a charity serving the homeless, they remain homeless.
Geel Community Services supports New York City’s “neediest and most vulnerable.” St. Francis Friends explicitly serves the poor. In her glowing review of Breaking Ground (formerly Common Ground) in NYC, Goldstein references their programs for “troubled youth” and ends with:
“All the Common Ground buildings and services offer affordable housing, security, and opportunities for the homeless to become productive members of a community while offering savings to the taxpayers…Elder Care Health Outreach (ECHO) helps aging residents to live independently for as long as possible, thus avoiding the expense of institutional care. We like to say that in this country, everyone has the opportunity to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. The problem is that not everyone has bootstraps. A public investment that provides these bootstraps pays dividends in a not against, with manner.”
The therapeutic communities that point to Geel as their inspiration, like Gould Farm and Rose Hill, do not accept people as they are. They aim to “rehabilitate” them. The goal is to train them to conform with societal norms and engage in paid employment.
Like Geel, the programs bring up a complicated mix of feelings for me. I don’t think they’re bad. In fact, I have no doubt they do good work. I’m glad they exist. In order to gain support — and get funding — from the public, foundations, and politicians perhaps you need to use this type of bootstraps and permanently homeless language. But, ultimately, I know I wouldn’t want to be one of their participants.