Allan Appel Photo
Trailblazer Phyllis McDowell joined Thursday night with daughters (in back row) Duby and Martha and (front row) Katy and Meg.
Phyllis Murray McDowell’s father Arthur — make that Arthur as in the eponymous Arthur Murray Dance Studios — believed that dance might not be curative but is certainly good for absolutely everyone, including people coping with mental illness.
But that’s far from the only reason why McDowell, back in 1960, established right here in New Haven a pioneering social and recreational program — a one-night a week, all-volunteer staffed, activities club, including lots of ballroom dancing and socializing, for people with mental illness to ease their re-engagement into regular life.
Roll the clock forward 60 years and McDowell, looking like she could still cut a rug, was on hand Thursday night for a festive, sold-out party at the New Haven Lawn Club, along with 240 admirers, to help celebrate the 60th anniversary of what now has become Fellowship Place
With its own skills training center in McDowell’s name, a clubhouse with well-established art and music therapy programs, and several buildings of supportive housing adjacent to the Elm Street campus near Dwight, Fellowship Place has evolved in a major way.
Over six decades it has become New Haven’s preeminent full service social and vocational center for people with mental illness. People go there to help develop coping skills and to transition back to regular life routines. There are about 850 “club members,’ with 150 for services on the campus every day, said Fellowship Place Executive Director Mary Guerrera.
Guerrera said her group counts on the annual gala to raise a significant chunk of its $3 million annual budget. About 70 percent of that total is funded by the state. Through grants, philanthropy, and events such as Thursday night’s gala, the 30 percent balance must be raised every year.
That level of recognition from the state and clinical world of the value of social and rehabilitational services represents a remarkable change, said Jim Rascati, a longtime board member of Fellowship Place and one of the evening’s honorees, along with U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal.
“Someone told me there’s this club for mentally ill clients,” he recalled of his first awareness of McDowell’s work back in the early 1970s.
Back then, McDowell’s dad’s dance franchise was becoming world famous. And mentally ill people were expected either to be in the hospital or have it totally back to normal and out into the world upon discharge. No rehabilitational or transitional social services were available for the stage in between,
At the time Rascati was the coordinator of the evening program at Connecticut Mental Health services on Park Street. He began bringing groups of his patients who were on the verge of being discharged over to the then-small basement social club McDowell was operating in the basement of the former Jewish Community Center on Chapel Street.
Rascati with Executive Director Mary Guerrera at the gala.
Without any formal training or academic supervision, McDowell had created a bridge between clinical and social/rehabilitational services, said Rascati.
He also confessed that he still doesn’t know how to dance.
It took a full 16 years before, in 1976, Fellowship Place received its first formal grant from the Connecticut Department of Mental Health & Addiction Services. By that time McDowell, through tenacity and the mentoring of other volunteer leaders, had grown the program and begun looking for a permanent space of its own. She found what eventually became the 441 Elm Str. campus, where she opened with a full weekly program in 1986.
As she was honored Thursday night, McDowell was surrounded at Thursday night’s event by her four admiring daughters — Duby, Martha, Meg, and Katy.
“We all grew up with Mom going to Fellowship Place every Monday night,” recalled Duby McDowell, a former broadcast news reporter and now the owner of a communications consulting firm.
What did their mom say when the girls clamored for Phyllis McDowell to be home on Monday nights?
‘’‘My gang’s expecting me,’” Duby McDowell recalled.
Current board member Debbie Cook, former board member Carol Horsford, and husband Jesse.
That gang, to whom Phyllis McDowell gave her home phone number, would call at all hours, and even some times in a state of emergency, wanting, absolutely needing to speak to Phyllis. Now!
“We were her little secretaries,” recalled Meg McDowell Smith, who now runs a community foundation in Vermont.
“It was a different time,” said Duby. The perception then was that the people were either “normal” or “mentally retarded,” the latter belonging in walled-off institutions. “There was no idea of the in-between,” or how their needs might be recognized and met.
Phyllis McDowell went about changing that perception without recognition or fanfare, with no complaint, “impacting our lives by showing us how to go beyond your own world of privilege,” Meg recalled. “Mom was a trailblazer.”
Phyllis said work remains to be done: “an acceptance of [the need for a place of] transition between the hospital and life outside. It should seem normal, like a recovery from a physical illness.”
That translates, said Rascati, in the need for people to recognize the value of the services that Fellowship Place provides, especially at a time when funding on the federal level is being dramatically cut.
With daughters Martha and Duby.
From Guerrera’s perspective: “We struggle to pay our staff fair wages. They fall short of what nurses and teachers make. And there needs to be a recognition” to alter this.
The other great challenge that Guerrera sees growing: “We need more supportive housing.” Currently Fellowship Place, with its three buildings close to campus and one on Whalley Avenue, operates 42 units of permanent supportive housing.
That must grow, she said. “The number of people coming to our homeless programs is up 50 percent.”
For those interested in learning more about Fellowship Place or in supporting its programs, click here.