Northside Center for Child Development's Comprehensive Approach to 9/11

By Patricia Bryant, CSW, Chief of Intake Services, Chapter Board Member
(February/March 2002)

Northside Center for Child Development, Inc. was founded in 1946 by the preeminent psychologists, Drs. Kenneth, and the late Maimie Phipps Clark. It was their ground breaking research exposing the harmful effects of segregation on the intellectual and emotional development of children that helped drive the Supreme Court's historic 1954 ruling in Brown vs. Board of Education. Northside was the first, and for a long time the only, private child guidance clinic in Harlem.

Northside distinguishes itself from other community mental health centers by its non-traditional approach to the problems of children and their families, and the community that surrounds them. We combine clinical therapeutic work with educational and recreational services to meet the needs of children and youth with emotional/behavioral and educational difficulties, as well as their families, in a holistic manner.

Staff Support

Northside's initial response to 9/11 was to assess the impact of this event on its entire staff and to identify ways in which the agency could be supportive of them during this time of crisis in our city. The administrators at Northside met with staff to determine how they were impacted and to find out what their needs were.

Staff felt the following would be helpful. They wanted an opportunity to meet on an individual basis or in groups to talk about their feelings and experiences related to 9/11 and to identify and exchange coping strategies that they could use to draw on during these stressful times. Daily opportunities for this type of formal and informal sharing were organized and food and refreshments were always provided.

The next thing that staff requested were training opportunities. They felt that having access to information about the impact of trauma would better prepare them for work with their clients. Northside quickly put together an in-service training meeting for staff. Ms. Judy Rogers, CSW, an authority on trauma, came to the agency and presented a seminar on the effects of trauma on adults and children and treatment strategies. In addition to this in-service, staff was encouraged to participate in DMH sponsored FEMA training, and other workshops offered throughout the human service community.

The final thing that seemed to help staff cope were opportunities to contribute to the community directly affected by the attack on the World Trade Center. Northside encouraged and developed opportunities for staff to volunteer at the Family Assistance Center at Pier 94.

Client Services

Northside Center provides a range of mental health services to children and families who experience an enormous amount of stress and trauma on a daily basis. Because of this, we were particularly concerned with how our clients were impacted by the events of 9/11. It was decided that the best strategy to take was to screen all clients for trauma. Clinicians met with clients in either individual or group settings to encourage them to talk about how they were affected, to assess their needs, to provide them with information on the signs and symptoms of stress (these symptoms/reactions were normalized) and to offer coping strategies that they could use to help themselves and their children. In addition, clients were encouraged to join our "drop in" groups with their families, friends, and neighbors. The purpose of these groups was to provide information and support.

Community Outreach

Northside has always been committed to ensuring that the community at large has access to our services. Therefore, we felt compelled to reach out to those populations that would not normally seek traditional mental health care. To this end, we placed ads in ethnic papers offering our services, we updated our website to include information on the effects of trauma and publicized our availability for crisis counseling.

We also sent our parent advocates out to the bodegas, beauty parlors, laundromats, etc., to distribute informational flyers, to engage people in informal discussion about their experience and reactions to 9/11 and to invite them to our informal "drop in" groups that were being held daily, evenings and on Saturday.

9/11 was an unprecedented event that impacted the lives of all New Yorkers. Northside, like all other agencies around the city was faced with very little time to process our own feelings of shock, sadness, fear, etc., before we had to put a plan in place to address the needs of our population and the community that we serve.

In closing, I would hope that the information that I've shared can be useful in the following ways: 1) that it adds to the current interest and discussion on best practices that will result from examining the human service community's response to those directly and indirectly affected by 9/11 and 2) that funding sources and policy makers examine the unique funding needs of the community based agency. It is important that they make every effort to provide funding that will support our continued efforts to deliver services to the under served.