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Open Arms seeks $35m to embrace mentally ill this year

Published:Monday | January 2, 2023 | 1:23 AMAinsworth Morris/Staff Reporter
Yvonne Grant, co-founder of Open Arms Development Centre, speaking on the grounds of the Kingston-based facility last Thursday.
Yvonne Grant, co-founder of Open Arms Development Centre, speaking on the grounds of the Kingston-based facility last Thursday.

The operators of the Open Arms Development Centre, a non-profit organisation that rehabilitates mentally ill patients in Kingston, are seeking $35 million to fund their operations in 2023. This will include giving them the chance to resume face-to...

The operators of the Open Arms Development Centre, a non-profit organisation that rehabilitates mentally ill patients in Kingston, are seeking $35 million to fund their operations in 2023. This will include giving them the chance to resume face-to face classes.

Yvonne Grant, co-founder of the facility, told The Gleaner last week that she is mindful that she has to bring in the money or the doors of its training facility, which offers HEART/NSTA courses in barbering and electrical installation up to level two and prepares candidates to sit mathematics and English language in the Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate (CSEC) examinations, will be forced to close.

The training facility was started some 16 years ago, and up to 2019, it catered to roughly 50 mentally ill persons, but was closed when the pandemic hit the island.

Grant said that to get back on track, it will need new machinery and an upgrade to the skills training room with advanced technology that can facilitate online classes.

“We need at least $35 million, especially when have to assist to pay for training outside and the basics. We aim to reach at least 30 persons, and the courses are taught by certified teachers and they need to be paid,” Grant told The Gleaner last week. “And also when they do the barbering, we give them a starter kit, so that they can start earning, and then once they earn and they save up enough money, then they can begin to work towards moving on.”

Grant, who is a trained nurse and specialist practitioner in community mental health, noted that the reintegration programmes “are quite expensive”.

“Just getting them to move on with certified skills and all of that is costly. Nearly 90 per cent of homeless persons would not have birth certificates or tax registration numbers. They have never worked, and so we have to do documentation and that costs quite a bit because we have to pay for them and they have to have these things to become employed, and they have to have bank accounts, which require money to open,” she explained further.

No money to pay staff

She said that the facility also needs staff.

“ ... We don’t have money to pay staff. We employ a secretary and [an] administrative assistant and we employ competent persons and train them to be rehabilitation officers because it’s not a training that’s offered in general and we have psychiatric aides that work with us as well,” she said, adding that mental health staff also work with the facility.

Grant noted that many of the relatives of the homeless and persons being rehabilitated have either moved on with their lives or are in worst situations than the participants and do not help to fund the programmes.

She noted that the participants also take part in other training outside of the facility, through other agencies, in areas such as building technology and entrepreneurship.

While grateful for the assistance rendered during the holiday season by social clubs, churches and volunteers, Grant said that with the start of the new year comes fresh bills to care for and train participants.

The Open Arms Development Centre serves Kingston as a drop-in, residential, rehabilitation, reintegration and resettlement facility which also offers their participants training before releasing them back into the society.

Forty participants are now admitted at Open Arms Development Centre.

Last Thursday, Grant recalled how her journey with Open Arms Development Centre started.

After working in the United Kingdom, taking care of the homeless in East London and Essex, she returned to Jamaica and decided to work in community mental health. She was asked to join a committee that came up with a five-year strategic plan after the Ministry of Local Government sought persons to join the National Committee on Homelessness. That plan was presented to then Local Government Minister Portia Simpson Miller.

Though that plan fell through, Dr Maureen Irons Morgan, chief medical officer for Bellevue Hospital at the time, suggested that the adjoining building of the facility at Windward Road, which was not being used, become the Open Arms Development Centre and it started as a drop-in facility for mentally ill patients in November 2006 with 29 people registered on the first day.

ainsworth.morris@gleanerjm.com