Rebuilding broken lives

By DEVIN HEILMAN

Staff Writer

COEUR d’ALENE — After their first shaky steps into the rescue center, the women who cross the threshold of the Union Gospel Mission Center for Women and Children have the chance to open new chapters in their lives.

Whether they're fleeing abuse, addiction, trauma, pain, homelessness or a long history of poor choices and bad circumstances, they have the power to make a change.

And UGM helps them find that power.

"We start with hope — giving women hope and the opportunity to dream again," said director JoAnn Zajicek. "A lot of women don’t think that they have hope for the future. We give them a chance to see that there is a future."

The 40,000-square-foot UGM Coeur d'Alene facility on Haycraft Avenue officially opened in early September 2012. It has the ability to house up to 100 women and children in more than 30 bedrooms. It features counseling offices, rooms for medical and dental exams and a computer center for conducting job searches and furthering education.

Its three floors provide plenty of safe space where healing happens: a chapel, several classrooms, quiet corners with cushy couches.

"One of the reasons we make it so homey like this is because a majority of our women are coming from behavioral health, they’re coming from jail, they’re coming from all these places that are sterile and not home-like," said Ann Hammer, UGM's community engagement coordinator. "If you put someone in this kind of situation, it raises their confidence, it raises their self-esteem, and they actually learn to take care of something like this."

The ladies have chore lists, such as cleaning the big, restaurant-sized kitchen and sweeping the floors, to help them take ownership of their environment and train them for when they're out on their own.

“They all have responsibilities,” Zajicek said. "We talk a lot about a hand up, not a handout, trying to teach them. Some women have never worked and never been responsible. I always say it’s like helping the women grow up, they got stunted somewhere in their lives because of trauma or addiction, so you’re helping those pieces of her grow back up and become responsible and mature."

Nearly 600 women and children have passed through the nonprofit mission since it opened. On average, about 40 women and up to 30 children call the mission "home" on any given day.

The women's residential recovery program takes 18 to 24 months to complete. It's done in five phases focused on different goals, starting with learning how to trust and exploring a relationship with God. Each four-month phase includes one-on-one guidance, group therapy, Bible study, life enrichment classes and hands-on work.

"Part of our goal is providing a safe and healing environment, because that’s where they have the ability to let down their guard, so like, ‘OK, now I can actually do heartwork that I need to do,’" Zajicek said.

Clinton Blettner, lead probation and parole officer with the Idaho Department of Correction in Coeur d'Alene, has worked closely with numerous UGM women since 2015.

"I have multiple stories of women’s lives who have been completely changed by UGM," Blettner said. "UGM gave them the resources and support they needed to break the cycle of addiction and homelessness in their lives."

Blettner said UGM is good for the women who go through the program as well as the community as a whole. He said it gives women, many of whom have children, a safe haven to overcome the issues that have plagued them through their lives.

"Women are able to clear their mind from drugs and alcohol, adjust to community living in the UGM center, identify healthy boundaries in their personal relationships, go deep into past wounds and the pain which caused their addictions, build an accountability team to support them in the future and then participate in a business practicum which gives them the experience needed to gain employment after they graduate," he said. "There is no other program like this in Idaho, let alone the Inland Northwest."

He said he tells the girls who get accepted into the program, and who are on felony probation, that they've "won the lottery."

"UGM only accepts nine girls every four months," Blettner said. "During that same time period, they get hundreds of applications from women in our jails and community."

He said from a lawman's perspective, he sees how programs like those offered by UGM save Kootenai County and the state of Idaho tens of thousands of dollars each year.

"It costs $55 per day to house an inmate in our state prisons," he said, referring to a study done in 2013. "Every person that goes through UGM is not taking up a bed in prison, or the Kootenai County jail. UGM offers all these resources with no cost to the taxpayers. Often, the girls never cost the taxpayers again, instead they become taxpayers themselves."

The services and the program are free to the ladies who are accepted after completing the application and interview process. Those who do enter the recovery don't have to pay a thing. UGM's $1.2 million budget is 90 percent covered by grants and donations from Idaho residents, and 170 volunteers keep the place running with 23 paid staff members.

"It doesn’t cost you anything, but it costs you everything,” Zajicek said “It may be free as far as monetarily, but they’re doing hard work, they’re working, going to classes. It’s hard. It’s a full-time job for these ladies."

It costs about $30,000 to put one woman through one year of the recovery program, “which, in a secular place, would be hundreds of thousands of dollars, getting provided all that they get provided here, including counseling and all that,” Zajicek said.

Looking back at the first five years of UGM in the Lake City, Zajicek said she wants to move forward with more community connections and expanding on the children's services.

"I felt like we spend the first two to three years creating, and now we’re at this place of refining," she said. "I feel like here we are at five years, really owning what we do."

Hammer said within the next year, UGM hopes to secure a location to open a local thrift store, which would help a little with revenue while giving women in the center a bit of retail experience.

Zajicek said she hopes to add transitional housing to the list of services UGM can provide to program graduates. She said it takes about five years to totally kick an addiction or unhealthy lifestyle, so transitional housing would allow the women living there to maintain better communication with their support systems and stay focused on the goals they created while in the program.

And once they've completed the program or done as much as necessary to turn around their lives, the goal is not for them to go back on food stamps and re-enter the legal system — "We’re trying to make women who are thriving, who are going to be healthy," Zajicek said.

“I look at the women when they walk into the house, hopeless, discouraged, knowing that if they don’t do something they’ll die or end up in jail,” she said. "In just a matter of days and weeks, you begin to see the transformation that starts on the inside and is reflected in their face. You begin to see this tough girl begin to let down her façade and you see this beautiful smile and eyes lighting up. You hear her begin talking about her future and talking about working on getting her children back, and then when she does get her children back, we get to celebrate with her.

“There’s nothing like that.”

Info: www.uniongospelmission.org