Causeway Work Centre
Lead Organization: Causeway Work Centre
Location: Ottawa, Ontario, Serving: Ottawa
Why People with disabilities face the huge challenge of living with a condition that has interrupted their lives and often robbed them of their hopes and dreams. Mental illness for example, perhaps more than any other condition, predicts poverty and homelessness. For many years, individuals with mental illnesses were systematically denied the opportunities enjoyed by other citizens in their communities and relegated to the margins of society. With the advent of improved psychiatric treatment options and rapidly developing community mental health systems, this situation has gradually begun to change. We are finally coming to understand that people with disabilities can live, work and participate in community life just as other citizens can.
What Ottawa's Causeway Work Centre is a non-profit agency working with persons with disabilities in a rehabilitation model, with a focus on employment as a key component to recovery and integration into the community. The centre is client-centred, offering services to respond to the needs and priorities of individual clients and jointly operated by clients and staff. The clubhouse program is a subsidiary of the centre. It is inspired by the Clubhouse model, a community-based mental health model designed to strengthen skills and develop the environmental supports necessary to sustain an individual with a severe mental illness in the community.
Who The centre assists people with disabilities integrate into community life in Ottawa and the surrounding area of Eastern Ontario (with a supported employment program in Renfrew, Pembrooke, Smiths Falls, Perth, Kingston, and Brockville). Its clients may also be homeless, have addictions, and have little or no income.
The centre was founded in Ottawa in 1979 as a sheltered vocational workshop. In 1993, the program strategy was overhauled and the centre began operating on the Clubhouse model. The clubhouse program is linked with some 350 similar organizations around the world through the International Centre for Clubhouse Development in New York City.
How Causeway Work Centre presently operates eight programs in support of its holistic and client-centred approach to assisting people with disabilities regain full lives in their communities:
1. The Clubhouse Model Program supports an 'intentional community' of 50-60 Clubhouse members, who run the Clubhouse with the help of the staff and are encouraged to make decisions collectively. Services include educational opportunities, training and job support, and various community support services such as a social recreation program. Over a typical six-month period, about forty percent of Clubhouse members move on from their voluntary and unpaid participation in the Clubhouse to transitional paid employment (facilitated by the agency) and regular (labour-market) employment.
2. Supported Employment Services are available to assist persons with a variety of disabilities to gain entry or return to labour-market employment. Services include employment planning, vocational assessment, job placement, training, workshops, work adjustment, on-the-job training, unpaid work experience and job coaching.
3. Mobile Outreach Team provides support services to persons living within or associated with the Shephards of Good Hope, Ottawa Salus Corporation and the Royal Ottawa Hospital. Most clients suffer from severe mental illness, are homeless or at risk of homelessness, and have substance abuse issues.
4. Homeless Jobs Project provides persons who are homeless or at risk of homelessness with entry-level, part-time and casual employment. The project is run as a business that hires homeless people to perform primarily manual type jobs exposing them to the demands and rewards of work, and expanding their sense of their own options.
5. Dual Recovery Anonymous is a twelve-step self-help program for persons who have a concurrent disorder of substance abuse and mental illness.
6. Krackers Katering is a community economic development initiative that provides training, paid employment and opportunities for people with mental illnesses to act as enterprising, productive and contributing members of their community. It is operated by the agency as a catering business that employs its clients.
7. Supported Education Model is a new initiative to help those whose education has been disrupted by the onset of mental illness to pursue secondary and/or post-secondary education.
8. Job Quest is a supported employment program for homeless and at risk individuals to help them find and maintain competitive employment.
Results Causeway Work Centre understands its results in the context of each individual's life. For example, a measure of progress for someone who has never been able to hold a job may be simply showing up for work on a regular basis. More generally, the Clubhouse program demonstrates a 40 percent success rate in supporting clients to move from the program to paid employment.
What's Been Learned The staff of Causeway Work Centre have learned that suspending judgment and listening to clients is more important than the staff's own professional knowledge. Staff cannot necessarily guide clients. Ultimately, the staff role is to help each client navigate through his or her unique recovery process. Conflict resolution skills are essential to making Causeway's programs work in practice.
What Comes Next The agency is working to create more employment opportunities and more vocational and educational programming for its clients. It seeks to develop a menu of services, created by its clients, that respond to the agency's central philosophical principle of client choice.
