SAXTONS RIVER — Within two minutes of conversation, Nancy Clingan is able to match people with social services many miles down the Connecticut River.
A quick laugh, and she says, “I'm a huge resource person, and I know people in the services. I have my Rolodex in my mind.”
The Saxtons River resident founded and runs Making the Most of I, a woman's group that celebrates its tenth anniversary May 11.
Central to Clingan's vision for this independent, locally grown, nonprofit organization is her fervent belief in the concept of education as a tool to help women and their families grow stronger and healthier, and her capacity for connecting people with services.
MMI has offered its services to more than 900 women in southeastern Vermont over the past decade. The youngest woman to go through the program was 17 years old; the oldest was older than 80.
“I never imagined it would last,” says Clingan.
Clingan is devoted to helping women move from a “mindset where people get trapped” to the affirmative vision, where “people do have ambitions and dreams. You have to believe it's okay for you to deserve it and to want to.”
The 14-week MMI course is offered four times per year, with no charge to the women participating. Each weekly 3½-hour class addresses such subjects as self esteem and body image, food and relationship, mothering and child development, going back to school, nutrition, stress reduction, communication and conflict resolution, diversity, and substance abuse and addictive behaviors.
Most recently, the Brattleboro AIDS Project talked to Clingan's current class about healthy sexuality.
Clingan describes each class as “just an opening to the idea of thinking about choices. There's so much information.” And each class provides a role model for the women in a course where each instructor is a woman.
As an instructor, “you take your own experience and share what's been learned,” Clingan says.
Welfare to work
Clingan, an expressive art therapist, began “Making the Most of I” in Bellows Falls in 1998 as a result of President Clinton's Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996. Known also as Welfare to Work Reform, the overhaul of the program required that welfare recipients get back on their feet within two years, by setting a cutoff point for financial assistance.
Clingan, working as an outreach coordinator for a community service organization where “it was all about low income,” remembers working on “basics” with women in her original group.
She describes fielding questions in the wake of the welfare reform mandate: “What kind of jobs? How [do I] get sober? How do I lose 80 pounds? Is there a need to take parenting classes? What do I do about an abusive marriage?”
“Starting right now we have to talk about poverty,” says Clingan. “A majority of [the] women are at poverty level. We have to talk about class.”
When someone is earning $5 per hour, “How does someone pay for child care?” Clingan asks. “The welfare system doesn't really help women to get off welfare.”
She describes the welfare system as creating families - mothers, children, and more children - who become “generationally dependent.”
“Women are usually the ones supporting the kids,” Clingan says. “I am certainly not blaming the people. We don't have the educational support.”
Clingan's program quickly became popular, broadening its appeal to women of low income who weren't receiving federal assistance.
Over the years, many woman haven't always found MMI an easy process for them - or for their families.
Clingan often encounters women from families who do not support education, or who see it as a threat. She sees a culture where once a woman has gained more education or has left an abusive relationship, she may no longer fit into the lives around her.
MMI teaches communications skills and how to diminish violence as a part of communication. In a trickle-down effect, partners, parents, and children may also learn these skills and pass them on, so the program's concepts usually don't happen in a vacuum.
“When you support the women it doesn't mean breaking up the family. Husbands and families see this,” says Clingan.
Building mutual support and self-reliance
The program resonates with Clingan to her core.
Once a pregnant teenager on welfare with two children, Clingan managed to get her college degree. As the first member of her family to do so, she knows firsthand what it is like to move forward, yet not know how and if she will still fit in.
From the MMI groups, Clingan has seen the women “come to appreciate each other, become friends in the group, and become a network themselves. The goal is not to become dependent but to support other women and become self-reliant.”
People know about MMI courses primarily through word of mouth. “The women themselves tell their friends, their sisters, their neighbors,” says Clingan. Her network of community resources also spreads the word: “They are also referred by therapists, ministers, doctors,” she says.
Since the program began, the course has branched out to several towns, shelters, and two prisons.
Women taking the course at the Morningside Shelter in Brattleboro will graduate May 22, and a new session will begin in July at Tapestry, a part of Phoenix House, also in Brattleboro. Tapestry is a post-incarceration facility for women, many facing addiction issues.
MMI is run by an eight-member board of directors, including two or three graduates of the program. “It gives these women some power, an opinion, a voice,” Clingan says. For some of the women it is their first time serving on a board.
The organization is funded from several sources. The town of Rockingham gives $3,000 yearly, and a foundation in Connecticut gives $15,000. Clingan and her board try to match that amount as well with fund-raisers and donations from individuals, institutions, and small foundations, all providing money or in-kind services.
But the cost to send one woman through the course is $1,000, which includes consultants, snacks, child care, telephone, and Clingan's salary.
According to Clingan, the program has “almost gone under financially several times.” Last year, the organization reduced the number of courses offered annually.
Despite financial setbacks, Clingan keeps on going. She has moved the organization's office to her home and has taken on an additional job to help support herself.
Her ten-year project is “the most rewarding work I've ever done in my life,” she said. “It's fed me as much as anything could have in my working life.”