Letter to MHS....the best place to work in California, the US, maybe the world. Will be posted in parts-though it may be long, the end is pretty cool. Part 1...

As I leave toward a new journey, a journey back home, back to my roots in Tucson, Arizona where my 83 year old mothers lives, whom I cherish and whom I feel urgent about spending time with before she is gone, how do I begin to describe a fourteen year career with MHS? How do I begin to describe encounters with literally hundreds of clients and staff members? A dear friend of mine, David Conn and I worked together at another agency prior to MHS; when he left there to join MHS, I asked him to keep me in mind if anything came up, and he said he would, and he kept his word on that. Six months later, he called me about a new contract that MHS got, SARMS, and offered me a job to help implement and design a new program with CPS and Juvenile Family Court. I and my boss started with two beach chairs in an empty office. From there, we built a program with four regional sites, over eight hundred parents, and fifty case managers. Parents, whose children were removed by CPS, were mandated to us for assessment and placement into treatment. Their children had been removed due to alcohol and/or drug use. The presiding Juvenile Court Judge, James R. Milliken, was instrumental in securing funding for the program. He was a unique man who for years had witnessed the long-term damage to children in foster care. The average time children spent in foster care was nearly five years before the cases were resolved. Judge Milliken told everyone who would listen that this was detrimental to their emotional development; he knew there had to be a better way. His goal was to shorten their time in foster care. Within five years, the time frame was reduced by half. As far as I was concerned, Judge Milliken was light-years ahead of his peers, a down to earth kind of man, and someone I regarded as a saint. Between his efforts and MHS, the program succeeded not only in shortening foster care, but in reunifying a great many parents and children, and saved the county millions of dollars. A year and a half later, MHS was got a contract to start a three-hundred-bed program in a women’s prison in Norco, California. I was offered the job of Program Manager. When I realized the magnitude of the job I panicked several times over the next few weeks. I had never done anything that big, and had never managed anything. The program was located in a double-wide trailer that was being built, but it wasn’t finished yet, so we started in a gym. The women were mandated to the program. On the first day, they came to the gym, a hundred-and-fifty of them; they were disrespectful and just plain pissed about being forced into the program. Prior to the program, they had pay numbers; so as a result of the mandate, they lost their twenty-or-thirty-cents-an-hour wage. The lessons and experience I had from working in a men’s prison before MHS came to bear. I knew that we had to do three things to get the women to buy in: one, target the “shot callers”; two, use our experience, strength, and hope (an expression borrowed from Alcoholics Anonymous); and three, build community. Being in the gym presented its own challenges; it was August and over a hundred degrees with no air conditioning or fans. There were swarms of bees circling in and around us, and formidable acoustics. The room echoed badly. We had no desks or office supplies yet, and were doing intakes and assessments using cardboard boxes as desks. I evolved into the management role quickly, and was able to convey to the staff the notion of “community building” as a critical element. Truly, the staff was so amazing and courageous just to show up every day to such adverse conditions, resistance from the clients, and the prison staff, who made it obvious they were not in favor of drug programs. The clients were convicts first and foremost and they put us through constant tests. They cussed us out, ran games on us, and in general, gave us hell. But slowly, some of them began to wonder if perhaps what we were selling might be worth buying; a different life, one without the misery and heartbreak that comes with drug and alcohol use. A tiny glimmer of hope that one can get out of prison and never come back. Eighty percent of the women were mothers - mothers who had abandoned, lost, or given up their children, mothers who were deemed immoral by most of society because they put drugs and alcohol before their children.