JANUARY, 2007 - It’s an all-too-common story for people with mental illness. Symptoms begin appearing in their late teens and early twenties, the high school and college years. They spend the next 10-20 years in and out of the hospital, trying one combination of medication after another. They are told by doctors and family that they will never earn their degrees, hold a job, or experience success in the same way others will.
Finally, they come to Fountain House – usually in their 40s, saddled with failing or incomplete grades, defaulted student loans, a spotty work history, and shattered self-confidence. Yet in spite – or even because – of their long streak of failures, they are in search of the better life that they somehow know is available to them.
The Supportive Education Program is one of the many Fountain House programs that is re-writing that story. It is helping members stay in, return to, and graduate from school – and earn Bachelors degrees, Masters degrees, and everything in between. Along the way, it is challenging long-held ideas about what people with mental illness can achieve in education.
Begun in 2000, the program was the brainchild of Dr. Alan Doyle, Director of Education and Training at Fountain House; social worker Elliott Madison, hired by Dr. Doyle to re-conceptualize the organization’s education programs; and veteran staff social workers Susan Leiblich and Jane Hibbert. Together, the four worked with dozens of Fountain House members to build the largest program of its kind for people with mental illness in North America, serving over 100 participants each semester.
Late in 2006, the program received an extraordinary boost in the form of a $100,000 annual grant from Peter Lewis, former chief executive of the Progressive Group of Insurance Companies, which will fund tuition and related expenses for Fountain House members pursuing post-secondary and post-graduate education. Combined with an additional $100,000 to be raised annually by Lorna Graev, 1st Vice-Chairman of the Board, it forms the Graev-Lewis Fund for Success in Education.
Lewis and his son Adam had earlier made a two-year, $3 million grant to Fountain House – one of the largest in our history from a single family – to create state-of-the-art wellness centers at our 47th Street headquarters and at High Point Farm in Montague, New Jersey. Mrs. Graev lives with bipolar disorder. This Fund marks yet another collaboration between the long-time friends on two of Fountain House’s most innovative programs in recent years.
“I am passionate about education because it empowers you and gives you self esteem,” said Graev. “Learning makes you curious, makes you want to learn more. It’s the tool to improving your human condition – to being a more productive human being and to earning a better salary.”
Through the Graev-Lewis Fund, dozens of other Fountain House members will get the same opportunity. Among them is Davida Adedjouma, 50, who will soon receive her Master’s Degree in social work from NYU. A Fountain House member since 2004, she was diagnosed with mental illness in 1985. Since enrolling in NYU in September 2005, she has received a total of $1,800 through three separate micro-scholarship awards.
“Fountain House saved my life,” says Davida. “My tendency is to isolate, and when I do that I get suicidal. Going to Fountain House every day, and especially participating in the Education Unit, gave me a purpose, and ultimately the confidence to go back to school.”
