The Howie the Harp Peer Advocacy Center (originally named the Peer Specialist Training Center) was founded in 1995 by the late Howie the Harp. Howie, born Howard Gelb, was a once-homeless mental health advocate who believed that mental health consumers can play a key role in helping other consumers recover from their psychiatric disabilities. Howie the Harp conceived the Peer Specialist Training Program, obtained funding, recruited the first training class and developed the training curriculum. One week before the Center opened, Howie unexpectedly died. The HTH Peer Advocacy Center is his living legacy.
The Center offers an array of training and support services that have successfully helped hundreds of mental health consumers find meaningful, permanent employment in the New York area. All the Center's programs are based on the core value that self-help is the most effective method for people who seek to recover from mental illness. The Center is also run exclusively by professionals who have personal experience as consumers of the mental health system.
The Center currently offers four programs in an effort to reach its objective.
The original, and cornerstone program, is the Peer Specialist Training Program's goal is to assist trainees in finding employment as Peer Specialists in the human services field. Each trainee receives more than 100 hours of classroom training in such areas as counseling techniques, group facilitation, case management, services delivery, substance abuse recovery and conflict resolution. At the conclusion of classroom training, the Center places each trainee into a three- to six-month internship at an approved human service agency. Upon internship completion, the Center then facilitates each graduate's search for a permanent Peer Specialist position.
To date, this program has trained more than 400 mental health consumers. We have placed graduates into permanent jobs in organizations such as the Metropolitan Hospital Psychiatric Rehabilitation Services, the Post Graduate Center, Mount Sinai Medical Center, Beth Israel Medical Center, Kings County Hospital and Community Access. Also, unlike many traditional providers, the Center emphasizes job retention, which has been an historic obstacle for most mental health consumers. Job retention difficulty is often attributable to the lack of free and ongoing support services. The Center currently provides a wide array of these services, including individual counseling, stress management, and peer support groups. To illustrate its commitments, the Center also offers graduates lifetime access to placement and support services.
In the Assisted Competitive Employment Program (ACE), the objective is to help consumers who are seeking employment in fields other than human services by offering job readiness training, internships, placement, and support services. The program consists of two separate training tracks-one for consumers with limited work experience or significant gaps in employment, and one for consumers with recent work histories and minimal gaps.
Applicants are assessed to determine both their job readiness and their marketability. The Center's staff works with employers to develop positions that capitalize on the education, life and work experience, skills and talents of each individual. This approach to job development is labor-intensive, yet practical. Consumers, like most other members of the work force, are much more likely to retain employment they find personally and professionally rewarding. Dead-end, minimum-wage jobs do not sufficiently increase the standard of living for consumers. Unemployment and poverty rates for people with mental illness are the highest of any group of disabled Americans. The goal of the ACE program is to help consumers out of poverty.
The Technical Assistance Project (TAP) focuses on helping potential employers create work environments and job requirements that are beneficial to both the employer and the consumer employee by assisting the employers with recruiting, hiring, retaining and integrating consumer staff. Institutional discrimination and societal stigma are formidable barriers to the efforts of consumers to be involved in all aspects of community life. Consumers undervalue their abilities to establish careers, while employers frequently do not believe that consumers can make significant contributions in the workplace. These attitudes culminate in the exclusion of consumers from the workplace, and large numbers of consumers living in poverty.
In January, 2000, the HTH Peer Advocacy Center established a Forensic Peer Specialist Training Program. The Program is designed to facilitate the integration of mental health consumers with forensic backgrounds into community life. When developing the program they looked at the fact that more mental health consumers are housed and "treated" in state prisons and city jails than in hospitals. In New York City, the Rikers Island jail is the largest primary care provider for persons with mental illness. It is estimated that at any time, ten percent of the Rikers Island prison population-approximately 2,500 people-suffers from serious mental illness. Most of these individuals are released back into our communities but never become fully integrated, or reintegrated, back into community life. They are doomed to repeat an unending cycle of arrests and incarceration, unless steps are taken to break the cycle.
Unfortunately, the mental health community has largely ignored the needs of mentally ill people who have a history of incarceration. News reports of violent acts committed by the "deranged mentally ill" greatly stigmatizes the group, and tragically, there is little public will to provide them with the services they need to recover. The "lock them up and throw away the key" approach belies the reality that many former prisoners with psychiatric disabilities want to more fully participate in all aspects of community life.
The Forensic Program at the Center has three separate components, each of which provides service to mental health consumers who have been incarcerated. The first step is called Transitions, where forensic mental health consumers learn to use presentation skills designed to assist them in telling their "stories" about the treatment of people with mental illness in the criminal justice system. The purpose of this component is to facilitate systems change by identifying gaps in existing services. Upon completion, participants either move to Forensic Peer Specialist Training, or enroll in the Assisted Competitive Employment Program described above.
The Forensic Peer Specialist Training course encompasses skill building, training and job placement. Upon completion of the training, consumers go to work in human services organizations that provide services or supports to other mental health consumers.