This is from one of our female mentors.  We asked her to volunteer for one year to mentor a teenage girl, they are now on year 5.  Her mentee is now age 20.

Over my years of mentoring I have been asked to fill out several surveys that ask questions about  what difference I have made in my mentee’s life.  Over and over I have found myself answering questions such as “does mentee attend school more regularly than before?” and “does mentee get along better with friends and family?” with what I believe is the honest answer : “no”  By the end of each survey I am left feeling like an ineffective sham because I cannot identify a single quantitative measure of the positive effect my mentoring has had on this young woman’s life.  

 Then I go pick her up, spend ½ hour chatting with her mother about her school work or her family , then my mentee and I head out to spend a couple of hours together. Her mom says “be good”  and she calls back over her shoulder “ I always am” as she scampers to my car.  This rote exchange has become a ritual. We do the simple things that mentor pairs do—cooking, chatting, seeing a movie, visiting a greenhouse, having a picnic, maybe working on homework or an art project.  At the end of each visit, I bring her home and we make a plan for our next meeting.  Week after week after week  we repeat this comfortable, simple routine.  It seems so innocuous until I think about the rest of her life: the dark house with constantly-on television providing the only light in the living room; the dad who can only be relied on to break promises; the sister who is in and out of foster care , periodically passing through the home like a hurricane; the relatives who show up unexpectedly and leave as quickly; the half-siblings she has not met even though they live in the next town; …the list goes on.  And, frankly, my mentee has a stable, safe and happy life compared to many. 

 Do I make a difference?  I think so.  And so do all other mentors.

Our Youth and Family Wellness Program received this message from the federal agency funding it, SAMHSA:

As of the latest data reported through April 15, 2011 your grant has successfully achieved an intake rate of 100% or higher and a six month follow-up rate of 80% or higher. Congratulations on your efforts and keep up the good work!

Spectrum Youth & Family Services Ecstatic to Participate May 18 and 19 at The Clothes Exchange’s 10th Anniversary Fundraising Event

If you are a nonprofit in Chittenden County then you too know of The Clothes Exchange’s (TCE) stellar reputation as a charitable power-house, and that they are the philanthropic equivalent to a fairy godmother, working their magic and lending a hand to the lucky organization of choice.

This year marks the organization’s 10th anniversary and to highlight this significant milestone, TCE has decided to “spread the love” and not only welcome Spectrum as its main beneficiary, but re-invite all the past beneficiaries to participate in the event and revenue generation; Spectrum will receive 50% of the proceeds from the event and the remaining 50% will be equally divided among past beneficiaries.

Spectrum is the sole recipient of all funds raised from the sale of raffle tickets, and the organization is working hard to reach its $10,000 goal. “Tickets are practically selling themselves,” says Laura Latka. With prizes like a year of yoga from Evolution Yoga, a year of massage from Stephen & Burns, a year of green cleaning products from Seventh Generation and an iPad from Small Dog, it is no wonder. Visit https://donate.spectrumvt.org/raffle to purchase tickets online.

THE EVENT:
TCE is a mission driven social enterprise dedicated to turning clothes into cash for community benefit. TCE collects gently used apparel from the closets of well-dressed women and new apparel from generous retailers, wholesalers, indy designers and national brands and sells them at bargain prices at fundraising events. Each year, TCE selects a new nonprofit to partner with who receives event proceeds. In 2010, TCE raised $70,000 for the King Street Center. In total, TCE has raised $210,000 for nonprofits in Chittenden County.

The event takes place over two nights this year, May 18 and 19 and is being held at the Sheraton Hotel in Burlington. Visit www.theclothesexchange.org for more information and to purchase tickets. For more information, please contact Monica Taylor at: 802-660-0580 ext. 330.

Annie has been named  a Clinical Instructor at the Department of Psychiatry in the University of Vermont College of Medicine.  We are so proud of her, nice going Annie!

I hadn’t seen Annie Ramniceanu a whole lot in the last couple decades. My most vivid memory of her, in fact, was her offering me a beer at a fraternity party in a white plastic cup that I swear was the size of a watering can. Just for the record, although we were both 19 or 20, this was a legal beer because the drinking age then was 18. In hindsight, it might not have been a fabulous idea to drink beer from a bucket even if the bucket had our college emblem emblazoned upon it but it wasn’t illegal.

I mention this because recently I ran into Ramniceanu for the first time in a great many years at Spectrum Youth and Family Services. This time she did not offer me a beer, but that’s OK because it was pretty early in the afternoon and the last thing you’ll find at Spectrum is alcohol. Spectrum offers a wide variety of services to homeless youth in Chittenden County including food, shelter, and therapy while providing counseling for intact families, too. Ramniceanu is the agency’s clinical director. This means that in addition to meeting with troubled adolescents (and often their families), she oversees a staff of three other therapists, a pair of interns, and six student assistance counselors who work in area schools. She also teaches the practice of mental health counseling at the University of Vermont.

I’m not going to say that the Ramniceanu I remembered was a cool party animal, but I always felt a bit like Geek Man around her the not-cool college kid who skulked about campus with a pocket protector on his shirt and had a single eyebrow running along his forehead like shrubs on a mountain ledge.

And so I was a tad surprised to find her, these many years later, counseling teens with some of the most difficult problems in the county. Perhaps if I had known Ramniceanu better in college I wouldn’t have been surprised at all.

“There is so much that teenagers can teach us, but they get short shrift in our culture,” she says. “They teach us everything we haven’t resolved in ourselves: They’ll push our envelope and ask us to deal with things we might not be prepared to address.”

Moreover, her own adolescence was marked by her father’s suicide and her older brother’s ensnarement by a cult called “The Way.” (He was rescued and is fine today.)

Her office is at the top of a long flight of stairs at Spectrum One Stop on Pearl Street, and it’s dominated by a window with a view of an alley (adorned with curtains from a thrift shop) and a long couch and easy chair built into a conversational “L.” It is here where she meets with teens who are addicted to drugs or who’ve been profoundly abused or who are battling mental illnesses that for most of their lives have gone undiagnosed. Roughly 400 kids will receive ongoing counseling from Ramniceanu and her staff this year. Many will be homeless, and almost all will have a substance abuse problem. She sees a lot of pain, from both the teens and their parents, and some days seem desperately long.

But then there are the moments that make it all worthwhile, such as when she sees that kid who spent his days dulled by opiates is now in college, or when she runs into a former client at a bookstore on Church Street back in school and looking fantastic.

Her biggest concern is the prevalence of drugs and alcohol in Vermont, and the way parents here often take a naive view of substance abuse: They presume that because they smoked pot when they were young but still reached middle age safely, their kids will as well. “Don’t let feeling like a hypocrite get in the way of telling your kids not to do drugs. This world is a whole different landscape from 20 or 25 years ago,” she says.

Indeed it is. And I can’t imagine a better person to guide a troubled kid through it than Ramniceanu.

(Originally published Burlington Free Press, 10/10/04)

Below is a link to a 22 minute video titled “The Opiate Effect,” produced here in Vermont, detailing the tremendous impact that diverted opiate prescription medications and heroin are having on students. The US Dept of Justice produced it, and it is filmed partly at Spectrum; at the 14-minute mark you will see one of our counselors, Moni Turner, she does a great job in this.  The film is being distributed to all VT high schools and throughout New England.  It is a tribute to our entire counseling program that we are featured in this.
22-minute video about opiate addiction in VT