The Family Wellness Program NYC 2010

So my thoroughly enjoyable meeting with Kala Ganesh is over. Plenty of food for thought. I walk down 5th Avenue to my next meeting with Kerry Moles (Director) at the Family Wellness Program of The Children’s Aid Society. I stop on the sidewalk to check my direction and look up to see The Empire State Building. It feels great to relate to a city from the inside out. I have a meeting to get to and some lunch to find and I am walking past Macy’s store and looking up at the Empire State. It’s a crazy busy and often hard-edged city but it’s captivating. The thought of asking for a job at CONNECT and living in the city crosses my mind but I feel even shorter here against these colossal buildings than back home and the speed and amount people talk is against my nature so perhaps it wouldn’t work.

I find Kerry Moles on the 13th floor of an high-rise building on East 45th Street that houses The Children’s Aid Society. The Children’s Aid Society has been serving the Children and Families of New York for well over a hundred years and is a well-established and well-funded charity. In the waiting area I look at all the posters calling for people to create community and how to do it – simple things like speak to your neighbours, pick up litter, plant a garden on your street. My meeting with Kerry is energetic and very interesting. The Family Wellness Program was set up about 10 years ago and is unique in the fact it works from a family perspective. As Kerry explains, ‘when there is violence in the home, the whole of the family is affected. That’s why we address domestic abuse from the perspective of the whole family rather than compartmentalising each member.’ In order to assess what approach would most benefit the family, the Family Wellness Program assesses the family in order to determine the best approach to take to work with the family.

FWP has also set up the Coalition on Working with Abusive Partners with the goal of finding effective ways to intervene with people who abuse in intimate relationships. As luck would have it Kerry is chairing a meeting of CoWAP after she meets with me today and asks if I would like to come along.

Nipping out to get a Starbucks and make a phone call to my partner, I’m buzzing with the excitement of being a part of the weaving of the fabric of the society – however small and short-lived. It makes me feel connected to the city in a new way.
After checking in with Lyndon, who has heroically, uncomplainingly and single-handedly negotiated the streets of Manhattan with new walker and skipper in tow for the last few days, I extend my absent-parent pass a few hours more in order to join Kerry and her cohorts. It’s an illuminating meeting and I get the sense that I am present at the start of something very new and paradigm-shifting. There are no answers in the room but there are a group of people willing to ask some very difficult and contentious questions in order to move forward. As they sign off on the final draft of their Terms of Reference for the group I bid them good bye and good luck on their heroic journey.

Family wellness