Gainesville Opportunity Center struggles with funding

Editor’s Note: Ouida M. declined to give her full last name out of fear of discrimination by future employers due to her mental illnesses.

Four years ago, Ouida M. was housebound. She worked from home, paid people to deliver her groceries and stopped insuring her car because she would not drive it.

She said her post-traumatic stress disorder, bipolar disorder and an anxiety disorder kept her locked away from the world for so long.

Now, she leaves her home regularly for her job at the Gainesville Opportunity Center, a mental health rehabilitation center, to which she attributes her transformation.

“The truth is, my anxiety isn’t worse, and it isn’t better either, but at least I’m getting out and doing something,” she said.

But the center that changed Ouida’s life may not receive the additional funding administration says it needs.

At the end of March, the Florida Department of Children and Families announced that the center would receive about $73,000 less than the amount it was initially projected to receive. This could significantly impact the number of people the center can help, said Brett Buell, the center’s director.

The center is one of Florida’s 11 clubhouses, which are places where people can participate in work-related activities and interact with others to rebuild their lives. To change more lives, there needs to be a clubhouse in every county, Buell said.

The 11 clubhouses are funded by the Florida Department of Children and Families, Buell said. Officials were expecting to receive an extra $1.5 million during the 2019-2020 fiscal year.

However, at the end of March, this amount dropped to $700,000, he said.

This means that each clubhouse would receive an extra $63,000 instead of the projected $136,000.

While the additional funding will help the center, it will not allow it to reach as many people as it would like to, Buell said. The center will be unable to hire at least one additional employee because of the smaller amount.

Each staff member works with about seven or eight people a day, and this will result in these people not receiving the help they need, he said.

The center does not use medication to treat mental illnesses but rather provides people with the opportunity to participate in meaningful work-related activities, Buell said. These activities are designed to build confidence, skills and independence to help them adjust to a work environment.

“There is no pill that is going to take the place of you doing something meaningful,” Buell said.

One of the most common characteristics of mental illness is the tendency of a person to isolate themselves, Buell said. But the Gainesville Opportunity Center does not further isolate these people in the way the medical model often does.

It has them participate in activities such as cooking food, cleaning and working in the garden, he said. The quality of the job isn’t the goal, it’s the idea of positive productivity.

It prevents people from returning to a toxic environment and gives them the opportunity to turn their lives around, Buell said.

“In this system, you often become your mental illness,” he said. “Here, you are a person.”