"Building a Community"

Children are the most sensitive and precious creation ever to exist. Some live healthy and productive lives with a caring family. Unfortunately, others have to survive on their own, guided by instinct or fear. Day to day living can be unpredictable for some children, while others live in a routine of predictable emotional or physical abuse. These emotional and mental stresses result in a variety of health and behavioral issues. Is it a government’s problem or a community’s problem? With the number of children in this situation it appears that society still struggles with this question, or this problem wouldn’t be so prevalent. Unfortunately, this concern affects mainly the lower income of society.

However, there are some who make it their business to deal with the issue head-on. Taking on some of that responsibility are social workers and established organizations that cater to the needs of society’s young. Such jobs are not for the average job seeker wanting to make a buck or two, but for individuals who seek to make a difference. Moses Chadwick, the Executive Director of Tessie Cleveland Community Services Corporation, is doing just that. Trained by the University of Southern California School of Social Work, Chadwick’s 25 years in the business has given him the ability, technique and strategy to develop a unique service to serve families and their children.

Set directly in a needed community, Tessie Cleveland Community Services is located in Los Angeles, California’s South Central area. The center assists adolescents and their families with emotional, developmental and adjustment issues to improve their functioning and social well being by providing services as what’s been dubbed as “out of the office and into the hood.”

Established in the namesake of the late Tessie Cleveland, Ph.D., Chadwick’s mentor and supervisor for more than 14 years, he says, “She was a leader, pioneer and educator in social work. She published over 38 articles and started the social work program at Martin Luther King Hospital, and during her doctorial work did research on social workers in emergency rooms, which is now the national standard.”

Utilizing the team concept developed by Dr. Cleveland of pairing professionals with paraprofessionals, Chadwick has been able to use those teams to provide culturally and linguistically appropriate mental health services. Coming out of retirement from King Drew Medical center as a social worker, Chadwick began consulting for a community agency that specialized, specializing in mental health, but was experiencing difficulties delivering services to the community.

He was successful at building the revenue of that agency by taking it from a $70,000 yearly revenue center to establishing a $5 million dollar contract with the Department of Mental Health.  In 2002, he decided to take advantage of a county consulting opportunity.

Strategically, In 2004, Chadwick seized an opportunity to spearheaded an organization that would position itself to be available when a county contract went out to bid. Since the county liked the Cleveland service delivery model because it was so uniquely different, they hired him to run the struggling program for two years to maintain the integrity of the existing organization that was developed.

When the contract went out to bid, after a year’s worth of negotiating, Chadwick was successful at convincing the county that Tessie Cleveland Community Services was the best qualified organization to do the job. At the time, however, they had no administrative structure, but fueled with his mentor’s knowledge, Chadwick put his skills to work.

Thirty-four original staff members, experienced in social work and mental health, helped to jump-start the program and deliver the method adopted from Dr. Tessie Cleveland’s strategy. “These are all of our founders. I am one of the founders. I just so happened to have been the clinical director at that time and as the idea and concept moved forward, and due to my many years of experience, I was elected to become the executive director. The service side was never a problem because I had already been running that as a private agency and with the county,” says the business guru.

Fortunately, Los Angeles County Supervisor Yvonne Brathwaite had an incubateship program used for start-up agencies. Special Services for Groups, a large and successful mental health agency, was assigned to Tessie Center, which provided administrative and all other support services needed to ensure success. During this period, administrative support was established and a $3.9 million contract was secured to provide services for the first year and as of December 2006, the Tessie Center became independent.

The Tessie Center services children from birth to the age of 21, with a special emphasis on children 5 and 18 dealing with, to name a few, problems in school and with peers, harmful or unmanageable behavior, sibling conflict, social withdrawal, depression, and suicide thoughts.

The mission of the not-for-profit community based center is to provide social services to a diverse population with focused efforts on the underserved and unserved members of the community; To provide prompt, sensitive, goal-oriented and measurable services that work together on improving and changing the quality of life for each of the clients and their families; To continuously develop innovative methods of service delivery that lead to positive progress for the clients, their families and the community in ways that are consistent with self-determination and preservation.

With outpatient treatment services, day treatment intensive services, and therapeutic behavior services, the center has become an asset to the inner-city community at large, and its families.

“We deliver service wherever it’s convenient for the family, at their home, at the school, at a park, wherever. Our professionals look and speak like our community. That’s how we reach out to it. We work hard to assist families in everyway, including those who have their children in foster care. We hope to bring a new technology of Internet medicine into the home, which we’re experimenting with so that our psychiatrist can see and talk to the client on the Internet to get needed changes and medical information quickly. We are in the forefront of developing this technique, which will become later industry standard,” Chadwick says compassionately.

According to the director, nearly 71 percent of families live below the poverty level in Los Angeles so the need for organizations specializing in such areas has become desperate.

He states, “We try to allow families to get the resources they need , rather than individual oriented, to help them achieve their highest level of success without being separated or misdiagnosed or mislabeled. We help them access other resources within the local community to help them work through issues of violence or abuse, rather than have families separated. And since we understand the ethnic and cultural point of view because we grew up here and understand the community, we are able to provide services 24 hours a day, seven days a week, when others may find it very intimidating. Most of the professional staff grew up in the community and still live in a three to seven mile radius of the center. They all give back by working for the agency.”

Giving back is the reason Chadwick came out of retirement and returned to a position he hopes will provide a life-long service to the most needed communities and their families, long after he’s gone. This he knows would make his special mentor, Dr. Cleveland proud, but equally as important, these children can grow up to be productive and successful citizens.

Source: Cranon, Angela M. "Building A Community" Minority Career Journal. Jan/Feb 2007: 13,30.

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