By Sharon Verbreten
“For every bad outcome, there’s a good outcome.”
That’s something Jeff Vande Leest knows well. He understands family dynamics and how quickly circumstances can get off track. But during his tenure as CEO of Family Services of Northeast Wisconsin, he worked for decades to create those successes.
Now, a new project and grant for Family Services will go a long way toward making that happen.
“It really is about breaking the cycle,” says Vande Leest, who served seven years as CEO and more than 25 years on staff.
Vande Leest has spent four decades in human services and started his career in the juvenile justice system. “Throughout my 45 years, (my philosophy and belief) is that we’ve got to work to keep families together. If we could start impacting a core group of families, it would be a start.”
Family Services operates 38 programs, touching about 18,000 lives per year. Before he retired this summer, Vande Leest worked to make the new Family Preservation Center a reality. Lois Mischler took over leadership of the organization in July.
It’s not just a building — albeit one on the historic register in downtown Green Bay — but also a location for forwarding the mission and hard work of preserving families.
“Problems come from a family and start with a family,” Vande Leest says. “The tricky part of our work is helping a family understand that they don’t have a ‘bad kid.’ More than likely, the child is reacting to dysfunction in the family.”
Often, however, a lot of services aren’t available to families unless they’re involved in the system. The organization looks to get families the help they need without going through legal or bureaucratic struggles. Being proactive with families before dysfunction sets in is key.
“One of the things I’m particularly proud of in my career is that we have really taken a lot of opportunities to do early intervention work,” Vande Leest says.
The new center is an eight-bedroom house, formerly used as a group home. It will be used for programming, teaching independent living skills, allowing families to spend quality time together, and possibly for emergency respite care. Fundraising will begin soon to modify the existing building and to fund staffing and operations.
“This is something I want to leave Family Services with … so the belief system I have of preserving families can live on and be enhanced,” Vande Leest says.
Vande Leest says the pandemic had a devastating impact for some families. “I worry as things start to get back to normal, some of the fallout we’re going to see. The bottom is going to fall out for some people,” he says.
“We saw families that were together all of the time and (issues or abuse) were hidden from view. Not everybody is safer at home,” Vande Leest says. “I heard that more times than I’d like.”
Some of the issues erupting both before and during the pandemic involve mental health. Family Services recently received a $25,000 grant from the Greater Green Bay Community Foundation’s Basic Needs Partnership to create a mental health awareness campaign along with partners Catalpa Health, Samaritan Counseling and Foundations Health and Wholeness.
“The campaign’s intent was not to market the services of any one of our organizations, but rather (to) simply encourage people who may or may not have been suffering from a mental health issue before, but because of the pandemic, they might be now,” says Cara Gosse, vice president of communications and development at Family Services.
“Our agencies saw clients with more severe mental health struggles during the pandemic than prior to the pandemic — many of them were closer to crisis than they normally would have been,” she says.
The campaign, which was created by Green Bay ad agency KHROME, will follow the motto, “Look In, Reach Out.”
“Simply ask people to take a moment to check in with themselves about how they are feeling, be honest with what they are going through, and then reach out to talk to someone — anyone — about those feelings,” Gosse says.
