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Serenity’s next step
Nonprofit Serenity Park has been helping men recover from
alcoholism and drug addictions for years. Now those who run it want to
build a similar treatment facility for women.
BY CELIA STOREY
ARKANSAS DEMOCRAT-GAZETTE
 If he’s learned anything in 43 years of
sobriety, Joe McQuany knows that "people don’t like to give money to
drunks."
"I found this out many years ago, alcoholics are hard to raise
money for," he says, his stirring baritone shaken just slightly by
mild Parkinson’s disease.
As Serenity
Park Inc. sets about raising $800,000 to build a women’s
alcohol and addiction treatment facility to match the services it
offers men at 2801 W. Roosevelt Road, he and his staff aren’t sure
where the money will come from.
But the teacher known (in certain circles) around the world as "Joe
McQ" believes that the money will come. He has the wisdom to tell the
difference between the things he can change and the things he can’t,
and money? Money is changeable.
He has no doubts. Meanwhile his assistant, Billy DeLuca,
Serenity Park’s
financial administrator, works on having the
serenity to trust that McQuany’s right.
"Not too long ago, he said, ‘Billy, we’re going to do this,’"
DeLuca recalls. "‘If it means we’re going to pay for this with nickels
and dimes, that’s what we’re going to do.’
"So we’ve got the plans, and the architects are in motion. We’ve
got a timeline established that we’re going to follow. We’re looking
at breaking ground in February, and the building will be completed, I
would say, in September 2005. That’s what we’re projecting it to be.
"So we’re going on with it. It will be built. How we’ll get the money,
we’ll find out along the way."
Why hasn’t the nonprofit been treating women all along?
"When we started out here, back in the ’70s, the area had a nice
program for women [at The Women’s Dorm], so we didn’t want to
interfere with them," McQuany says. "It fell on some hard times, had
some money problems, and they shut it down."
Over the years, Arkansas gained other substance-abuse treatment
programs for women, public and private, nonprofit and commercial.
"And we don’t mean to judge or critique any of them," DeLuca says.
"The uniqueness about Serenity
Park is the treatment model, Recovery
Dynamics. It’s based on the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous."
DeLuca and Don Blair, a member of the nonprofit’s board of
directors, are quick to note that Serenity
Park is not affiliated with Alcoholics
Anonymous or the Oxford Group that developed the famous Twelve Steps.
But Joe McQ’s guide to them and his Recovery Dynamics are widely used
in AA programs.
RECOVERY DYNAMICS
McQuany believes that becoming active in small Twelve Step fellowships
is the most effective way an alcoholic or addict can achieve the
sobriety, sanity, humility and usefulness compassed by the term
"recovery."
In AA, alcoholics admit they have a problem, trust that a power
exists — outside of themselves — that can help them (a sign on the
wall of Serenity
Park: "There is only one God and today
you are not Him"). Then they develop a relationship with a mentor or
"sponsor," who helps them through the self-evaluations, confessions,
apologies and service to others demanded by the remaining 12 steps.
Serenity does not accept involuntary
placements, but in the earliest stages of recovery, even people who
are desperately willing to get sober can be too confused to trust a
mere group of former drunks.
"We’re dealing with sick people," DeLuca notes.
Addicts looking for help want formal, professional care, and most
formal programs will help them get sober, McQuany says. But when they
emerge from some programs and rejoin the world, they turn to a Twelve
Step group for support only to find that the program they relied on in
treatment contradicts the philosophy of the group.
That increases the likelihood of relapse, he says.
"We don’t treat people over and over," McQuany says. "People have
been through other treatments for five and six treatments. That’s a
waste of money."
"Serenity
Park isn’t a system," DeLuca adds. "Sometimes people will come
here and they’ve been to treatments five times. And they’ve even had a
sponsor. I tell them, ‘Really, you don’t need treatment. You know what
you have to do. If you come in here, all I’m going to do is delay you
30 days in what you know you have to do.’’’
DeLuca and Blair say the success rate of Recovery Dynamics as the
program is applied at Serenity
Park is "80 percent to 90 percent."
They believe adamantly that it will work for women as well as men.
Which is one reason the women’s unit will not change the Recovery
Dynamics program to accommodate its clients’ children. In the throes
of addiction, McQuany says, women aren’t mothers, they’re drunks and
addicts.
"When you’re putting them in with that child, basically the
alcoholic and addict wants to get something from that child: ‘I want
my child.’ But what can you do for that child?
"That’s the difference between helping and enabling."
But why build a separate women’s house? Why not just admit women
with the men?
McQuany snorts. "That would destroy my men’s program if I did that.
"They cannot, they cannot, they do not recover together. They just
do not."
SUPPORTIVE GROUP
Canino Peckham and Associates have drawn plans for an
8,500-square-foot building that will stand apart from the current
11,600-square-foot men’s
1 facility on the 4 /2-acre campus — which was built in 1989
conveniently across the street from Mount Holly Cemetery and next door
to the Pulaski County Regional Jail.
(note)
(Convenient, that is, for the staff ’s favorite metaphor that
clients stand at a crossroads with three directions they can turn:
toward jail, toward death or toward recovery. A sign on the grounds
even points to the options.)
The women’s building will have 20 beds, common toilets and showers,
a laundry room and a classroom, a living room, kitchen and counselors
offices.
After the women’s unit is built, DeLuca estimates, the foundation
will need about $250,000 a year to operate it. He expects the money
will come the same way funds for the men’s unit do.
The men’s facility operates on income from outpatient and
residential client fees (for instance, the standard 30-day residential
fee is $3,500), their third-party providers and from the Arkansas
Division of Alcohol and Drug Abuse Prevention, which supplements the
program costs for people who can’t afford to pay.
Former clients donate money and also their time, acting as sponsors
for new clients.
"It’s their way of giving back. They want to do it," says Blair. He
estimates the nonprofit has treated many more than the official
estimate of 15,000 men over the decades.
"We’ve treated a lot of fine people from the community, too. These
people are not tramps," McQuany says. "These people are not homeless
living under a bridge. We don’t treat the homeless; we treat
alcoholics and addicts, [who] come from the families right here in
this community."
GLOBAL OUTREACH
The new women’s unit will actually house two nonprofits. The Kelly
Foundation will move there from its current cramped room in the men’s
unit.
Named for McQuany’s father, the foundation distributes his books
and teaches other agencies how to use Recovery Dynamics. (The program
is in use in more than 200 facilities worldwide, according to the Web
site www.serenitypark. org.)
The foundation fills orders for The Steps We Took, Carry This
Message, The Big Book Study Guide, CD, audiotape or VHS copies of
McQuany’s guide to the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous, and also
counselor and student materials for Recovery Dynamics.
Demand is constant, says Betty Sanders, the foundation director.
"We don’t do advertising per se. I have an Internet site [www.kellyfnd.com
], but it’s mostly word-of-mouth."
The foundation just spent $100,000 translating the Recovery
Dynamics counselor’s manual, client guidebook, individual evaluation
packet and The Big Book Study Guide into Spanish.
Sanders says, "We provide materials all over the world. To 19 of
the prison systems in California, and we send our stuff to AA groups,
to homeless shelters, to treatment shelters, to jail programs and
prison systems."
"When a treatment center wants to take on Recovery Dynamics, staff
member Larry James will go through an extensive training process with
all of the counselors and staff," DeLuca says. "Just did that in
Sunderland, England, with the Lazarus Center."
CONFIDENCE
"I’ll never be able to use alcohol because I’m allergic to alcohol,"
McQuany says while the men sitting with him around a long table in the
Serenity Park
dining hall nod agreement. "I have an abnormal reaction. To me, when I
take a drink, I want another drink. Another person takes a drink, he
doesn’t want another drink. He might want a Coke, he might want a
piece of pie. I want another drink."
But alcoholism has been a blessing in his life, he says. "I’m
happy. If I had my life to live over, I would do it the same way. I’d
be an alcoholic. To get where I’m at I’d have to go through being an
alcoholic. I’d take the same trip, the same suffering, the same pain,
everything. To get here.
"The AA people told me, ‘You’ve got to change your life. You are an
addict, so you’ve got to change into something else. You make a few
changes, you’ll lose your obsession to drink and you’ll never think
about it.’
"I couldn’t imagine that. But it’s true. I totally lost the
obsession to drink. I found out how to be happy. How to be
constructive. How to help people."
Helping other people deepens his recovery. "It’s a healing force,"
McQuany says. "You’ve got to carry that message."
So he believes that women who used to be drunks and addicts need a
place where they can carry the message. They are the community that
will make the women’s unit work.
"All that we need to do," DeLuca says, "is build the facility."
More information about Serenity
Park is available by calling (501)
663-7627.
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