Community Links Encourages Cultural Expression to Enhance Mental Health of Young Adults

Larisa Grinspan, Administrative Assistant, Yasmine Kamel, Program Manager, and Laurenda Lynch, Vocational Counselor for Community Links

A service of Baltic Street AEH (Advocacy, Employment, and Housing), Community Links is a kind of outward-bound for urban youth striving for mental health and a life free of substance abuse. Not that its clients pitch tents in Prospect Park for nature therapy. Rather the program has three reasons why it’s heading in the right direction.

 

First, Community Links claims to be unique for New York City in meeting the needs of 18-25-year-olds living with mental illness and substance abuse by providing them services “beyond clinical treatment.”

 

Second, the program’s staff members are peers, both in age and diagnoses, of the clients they serve. (Thus, it gets a little confusing when “peers” refers to both; you have to distinguish between the two by context.)

 

Finally, although the project is located at 1111 St. John's Place in Crown Heights, you might mistake it for an insurance office, with its desks aligned in neat rows; thus, discouraging more than a few peers at a time from hanging out there while searching for referrals in this neighborhood and beyond.

 

For, although Community Links is called a “recovery center” in City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene lingo—DHMH generously funds the center—it is more appropriately termed a “center without walls” or the starting point for the “city as community” because the goal, as Yasmine Kamel, program director, describes it, is “for peers to spread out and explore” the rich possibilities New York offers them in self-expression, education, vocational training, and jobs.

 

Since opening in March 2013, Community Links has welcomed several hundred guests to bi-monthly open houses at various co-sponsoring agencies in Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island, “showcasing resources in the community and providing clients with an opportunity to utilize them.” Community Links also organizes trips, workshops, and community discussions; all of which, like the receptions, are free and open to the public. This encourages residents, whether struggling or well, to support each other.   

 

Among the participating groups were Art Lab, HAI Art Studio, New York Public Library Youth Program, Black Women’s Blueprints, Everything Goes Book Café, Long Island City Roots Community Garden, Save Our Streets Crown Heights, and Opportunities for a Better Tomorrow.

 

Ms. Kamel attributed the success of the events to a mix of substance and style. The topics of “wellness, food and health, fitness, activism and community, visual arts, education, and poetry” naturally appeal to this age group. Plus the hands-on approach, including demonstrations and audience participation, made for a more effective learning experience.
 

Painting (2012) by Chiquita Montgomery, Community Links Peer Recovery Specialist

 

These events also help market Community Links’s long-term recovery service which matches individuals who self-report with a diagnosis to peer recovery specialists. The workers help their client-peers identify goals and tools to achieve them. Currently 30 people receive such assistance; the program has openings for more.

 

Education, vocational training, jobs, and parenting have been the main concerns of participants thus far. As a result of referrals to Medgar Evers College, Opportunities for a Better Tomorrow, and others, several peers have gained retail, food service, and administrative positions; one is training to be a home care attendant.

 

Kamel emphasized that too often young people become alienated and isolated. What they want is peer support for their creative passions. She added, “Here we don’t emphasize labels. We focus on assets rather than deficits by helping peers reach their goals and dreams. Thus, we discourage hopelessness and helplessness. [In the process] we fight stigma and promote holistic recovery.”

 

She continued, “Young people are open to creativity. It’s a good way to make connections with others. Through expression we come into our own beings, understanding ourselves and others. Creative communities are diverse, talented, knowledgeable, and innovative. These capacities are often underappreciated. Here, we encourage our peers to find the opportunities and means to use them.”

 

Painting by Anonymous, Baltic Street AEH, Resource and Wellness Center

 

Finally, Kamel, who prior to this position was program manager of Baltic Street AEH’s Resource and Wellness Center in Sunset Park, shared what might be a secret to some people: “My guess is that a little quirkiness is an aspect of creative communities. With the varieties of personalities and thinking you find, there is more understanding of the role emotion plays in our lives.”

 

Why did DHMH fund a program for which achieving your potential as a whole human being is more important than just surviving with a diagnosis of mental illness?

 

According to Yasmine Kamel, Baltic Street AEH has a reputation for successful innovation. And you might say that, in this virtual age, a recovery-center-without-walls is the cutting edge of that innovation. In addition to the many electronic means Community Links employs to communicate with its followers, Twitter will be next on the list of connections. So stay plugged in!

 

 

  

Community Links can be on reached on Facebook at Community Links NYC or at 929-210-9810. With headquarters at 250 Baltic Street in Cobble Hill, Baltic Street AEH runs 16 programs throughout New York City. For more information, see www.balticstreet.org or call 718-855-5929.


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