State-funded Renaissance Living Room intended as alternative to police, hospitals in mental health crisis – Chicago Tribune

Steven Adams stood outside a laundromat along Chicago Avenue on a recent afternoon smoking a cigarette as flurries slowly fell, the flakes melting as soon as they hit the sidewalk.

As his clothes tumbled in a washing machine, Adams stared across the street at the new Renaissance Living Room. He thought it might be a furniture store, he said.

Tucked between a shuttered storefront and a boarded-up former Chinese restaurant in the South Austin neighborhood, the Renaissance Living Room, a mental health center that opened this month, welcomes those experiencing a mental health crisis or in need of a safe space to rest.

All services at the center are free and open to anyone.

When Adams found out the facility is a mental health center where people in the community can go and learn about resources and talk to someone, he said it’s something he and others in the community need.

“That’ll help me very much because I can go in there and I can clear my mind out,” said Adams, adding he’s had addiction issues in the past.

“I struggled with drugs and opium and stuff and I need some help in that category also,” he said. “And lately, you know, so many friends and family members have been passing so I’ve been kind of struggling with that.”

The new center comes as mental health advocates have continued to push for the city to reopen the six city-run centers closed by former Mayor Rahm Emanuel in 2012.

The Living Room is fully funded by a more than $800,000 grant from the Illinois Department of Human Services Division of Mental Health. Renaissance applies annually for a renewal grant to continue to fund the center, said Michael Banghart, executive director of Renaissance.

The center uses a “living room” model, meaning people can just walk in and don’t have to deal with paperwork like a medical setting would require. They don’t even have to provide their name if they don’t want to, said Dorian Grace, a recovery-support specialist who works at the center.

It’s the kind of place Grace would have visited if such a space were around when he was experiencing depression, anxiety and isolation, he said. He experienced these symptoms most of his life and has since gotten therapy which helped him feel better, he said.

Most of the center’s employees are trained recovery-support specialists, meaning they have had their own experience with mental health crises or substance use recovery. The center also employs an on-call clinician for each shift.

“I think just talking to someone who gets it is one of the biggest parts of (healing) because when you are feeling low, when you feel like no one understands, like no one has ever felt like that before, but most people have,” Grace said. “And so whether you have a clinical diagnosis or not, whether you have been actively traumatized or not, everyone feels bad sometimes and you know, we are there to get you through that.”

The Living Room is intended to be an alternative to calling police or going to a hospital for mental health care. People sometimes can feel unsafe around police or be overwhelmed by the paperwork required in medical settings, Grace said.

Renaissance community mental health centers have served people experiencing homelessness in Chicago for 25 years, with programs that include street outreach, homelessness prevention, rehousing and senior housing services.

The center is the first space the nonprofit has opened using the living room model. To the right of the entry foyer is a room with several plants and chairs, like a waiting room. But people can either step in there first or go right into the living room space, where they can take a seat on one of several couches or at one of a row of high chairs with tables against the wall. A bookshelf in the living room is lined with books and stacks of games and puzzles.

The space also has a large dining table and a kitchen stocked with food, snacks, coffee and water.

At the end of the hallway are four rooms — an office space, a “chill room” with two twin beds for people to rest, a “flex room” with a couch and a fourth room that will eventually be a space for someone to get loud, Grace said. One of the rooms was designed especially to dampen sound, allowing people to release emotions and raise their voice without interrupting others in the space.

The center will soon be open 24 hours, but for now it closes at midnight while Renaissance works to hire more people for the overnight shift, Banghart said.

At a grand opening this month, Ald. Emma Mitts of the 37th Ward, which includes the Austin neighborhood, said she hopes the center will help connect people in the community to resources they need to improve their lives.

“As many of my community folks stand on the corner I’m sure that the Renaissance is going to be able to help them as well with the support that they need because they’ve been here for a long time,” she said to a crowd of about 50 people gathered near the center.

Mitts hopes the center, along with the church a couple of doors down, are a sign of change for the neighborhood, she told the Tribune after the event. She said she’s working to find out who owns the boarded-up buildings that take up about half the block so they can eventually be developed into more resources for neighborhood residents.

On the corner of Chicago and Cicero avenues, the shell of what once was a liquor store remains. Mitts said people still hang out on that corner, many experiencing mental illness or substance abuse issues. Her hope is they’ll walk the half block and get help at the Living Room.

State Rep. La Shawn Ford said he hopes the Living Room renews the way people think about mental health.

“Chicago needs more than its share of healing,” Ford said at the grand opening. “And when you think about mental health, behavioral health, there’s a stigma to it that we all know seems to drive people away from the help that they need.”

Arturo Carrillo, director of violence prevention and health initiatives at the Brighton Park Neighborhood Council and co-lead for the Collaborative for Community Wellness, said he loves the idea of living room model for a mental health center.

The Collaborative for Community Wellness is a group of mental health professionals, community-based organizations and residents working to address the lack of mental health care in Chicago.

“The models of living rooms give people a very accessible space when dealing with personal or mental health issues that require, kind of, a space for people to really decompress and be heard,” Carrillo said. “So for us in the mental health world, we know that people who are dealing with crisis need a space for de-escalation and support and that is very important in order to ensure people get the follow-up care that they need and prevent them from being entangled in harmful systems.”

Carrillo said he wishes city leadership would be more active in opening or funding similar spaces across Chicago, especially in the wake of the closures by Emanuel and Lightfoot’s decision not to reverse them.

“It’s very unfortunate though that it’s taken the vision of our state representatives, like representative La Shawn Ford, to push for this to happen in Austin instead of our mayor who should be the one building this sort of infrastructure in our city by way of expanding the public mental health centers that we have at our disposal,” Carrillo said.

Carrillo said the city’s five mental health centers that stayed open have limited services and hours of operation. The centers are open from 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.

The city has been unable to account for what happened to individuals who were receiving treatment before the 2012 closures, according to a 2019 Tribune report. The Chicago Department of Public Health at the time acknowledged it did not specifically track over time the people affected by the closures.

The city currently works with 31 private and nonprofit trauma informed care centers across the city and helps fund 20 public and nonprofit health centers.

“My administration is committed to ensuring that all Chicagoans have access to strong mental health care — along with safe streets and economic opportunity. We are carefully examining the evidence to determine which strategies will best improve the mental health system for our city’s most vulnerable residents,” Lightfoot told the Tribune in a written statement in 2019.

“We have moved beyond the walls of individual clinics, taking bold and needed steps to bring high-quality mental health services directly to people struggling with unmet needs, including those who are experiencing homelessness, substance use and mental health crises,” Arwady wrote.

The walls of mental health centers like the Living Room will help people like Adams get out of the cold and get the help they need, he said. Adams said he planned to visit the Living Room, once his clothes were done at the laundromat.

He also knows others in the community who would benefit from some of the resources the center and Renaissance Social Services offer, he said.

Adams would like to be able to take care of his family but first needs to find stability in his own life, he said.

“I love my life. I’ve got a couple of grandkids and got stuff I want to be able to do for them. I want to be able to help them,” Adams said. “But in the meantime I got to help myself first.”