50 years of fighting addiction Center's mission: Recovery is possible
It began simply enough.
In 1970, a man named Godfrey had a problem with drugs and alcohol.
“He came out of the Veterans Hospital … He was a painter by trade, and he got a little place on Wayne Street and was trying to stay clean and sober,” Linda Franiewski said. “He started a little painting business, and at the time there were drunks who used to sleep it off up at Diamond Park; it wasn't like it is today. He would bring them down and get them to paint and get them to go to AA meetings. They eventually became incorporated (in 1971), and that was how the (Gaiser Center) started.”
Then Ellen Gaiser took over as director.
“She came from a station in life that she had a family with means and high ranking in the community, but she was an alcoholic,” Franiewski said. “She used that platform to advocate. She really connected with just about anybody who walked into that center and did a great job … She got the certification, and she spent her time professionalizing and taking this from a little grassroots drop-in to a business that's contracted with insurance companies, licensed and all that stuff.”
The Ellen O'Brien Gaiser Center has one mission: “We believe recovery is possible for everyone, and we say that because recovery is a big word,” Franiewski said. “We say that for everyone because you have a family. We do involve family every step of the way. Families have to recover, too.”
This is a year of milestones for the Gaiser Center. It celebrates 50 years of helping Butler County residents and, in fact, anyone who wants to find sobriety. A new director, Joe Mahoney, is taking over, and its longtime director, Franiewski, is retiring.
Under Franiewski's watch, the inpatient facilities on Old Plank Road initiated separate housing and counseling for men and women. There's an outpatient center on Liberty Street, which hosts support groups and does intake evaluations.
There's even a focus on finding and hiring a full-time doctor to treat the physical issues a patient may be having, not just the drug and alcohol problems. The Ellen O'Brien Gaiser Center is doing very well.It wasn't always that way.When Franiewski took over 16 years ago, things were looking rather dismal when she opened the center's checkbook.Growth under Franiewski“We were pretty well done,” Franiewski said. “We were just about at negative equity. We had the one farmhouse building. That was it. It needed windows. It needed a heater. We barely could get by. We had a line of credit to make payroll. It was a tight financial situation with year after year losses.”If there's one thing Franiewski — who has an MBA in finance and a background in banking — likes, however, it's a challenge, especially a financial challenge. She had something else, too: a commitment to Gaiser borne of gratitude.“I had been a client there in 1984,” she said. “I was in my mid-20s and I found myself addicted to drugs and alcohol, and I ended up there from Pittsburgh. Somehow. Who knows? And I've been clean and sober ever since.”Today, Franiewski said, she has 36 years of sobriety, and it was at Gaiser that she learned the skills and knowledge she needed to stay clean and sober.The work at Gaiser is hard, but Franiewski has had some good days there as its director.“The best days are when I see hope and progress,” Franiewski said. “I mean, I see clients really feeling safe and ready to work, and happy. I see smiles on their faces. That might sound really corny, but they walk in so desperate.”A safe place
One of the accomplishments Franiewski finds most satisfying is being able to provide separate facilities for men and women, so that each gender has its own space and is not mixed.“We created a second building, and they no longer had any interaction or movement together,” she said. “Nothing. No lunch, no dinner, no meetings, no traveling. It made such a huge difference that it was beyond what I even could have imagined.”It's because of trauma.“You have to be safe and you have to be able to self-regulate, and the women could not do that with the men in the same building,” Franiewski said. She added that once the genders were separated, the program completion rate for women went way up, but the real surprise for her was that the completion rate for men also went way up.“It was my dream to get (the women) their own space, but I could not have imagined the positive impact it had on the men, because now we could really get to their issues, and they have a lot of trauma, too,” she said. “They just don't want to talk about it, especially in front of women.”The other accomplishment that gives Franiewski great satisfaction is the mental health care Gaiser offers. It's responsible for helping people stay on track, she said.It's also responsible for saving lives.“The Gaiser Center saves lives; it totally saves lives,” said Tammy Schuey, the chairwoman of Gaiser's board and general manager of Eagle Printing.It's not just wishful thinking that prompts her to say that. “I truly feel that the Gaiser Center, it saves people,” Schuey said. “I've heard the stories. We get notes from clients who have graduated from the program and are doing amazing and leading full lives, and if it wasn't for the Gaiser Center, where would they be? Recovering from addiction is hard. It's very, very hard.”Schuey became aware of the opioid epidemic in Butler when she began to see in the very paper she heads obituary after obituary of people who had succumbed to drug overdoses. It motivated her to join Gaiser's board of directors, which, she said, is very active and has a real heart for the work the center does.“The greatest satisfaction is the knowledge that I know that we are saving lives,” she said. “That's it. It's all about helping our clients.”The work is ongoing, however.“Even with all the news regarding the pandemic, addiction is still out there, and people are still dying,” Schuey said. “There is still such a need.”Mahoney takes the helmNow it's time for Joe Mahoney to take the reins. He brings with him experience as a social worker, passion for the job and passion for people.“I'm passionate,” Mahoney said. “I'm passionate about helping people get into recovery, whether it's recovery from addition, recovery from mental health (issues) or both. I'm a firm believer in the belief that people can and do recover from whatever it is, and that's the really important thing that I want people to know: I am an advocate for recovery.”Mahoney wants to change the conversation about addiction and what to do about it.“Too often we hear about the challenge and not the recovery, but we don't hear what happens after that, and I really want to promote the narrative about what happens after,” Mahoney said. “There is life after addiction, but I think the general public still doesn't have an understanding about that.”How will he promote that change of conversation? It's a lofty goal, but it's achieved by talking to one person at a time.“I really want to talk to the community and make sure our staff is trained in this recovery mindset, so that whenever we're talking to families, to the community, that it's all a consistent thread of: There's a whole person recovery, and this is what that path to recovery looks like,” Mahoney said.It's also a focus on treating the entire person.“One area that I do really want to focus in on is that the Gaiser Center here is expanding and increasing and beefing up our mental health services that we offer here on site so we can treat the whole person,” Mahoney said. “We can treat that overlap between addiction and behavioral health diagnoses to help that full path to recovery.”Now that Mahoney has taken over, Franiewski can leave with no regrets. She worked hard but knows everyone associated with Gaiser, both past and present, have also worked hard.“It's all been a labor of love, not only for myself, but I want to give credit to the people who have built it,” Franiewski said.
