TBO.com - TBO is Tampa Bay Online

'Club' Helps People Find Zest For Life

Tribune photo by JAY NOLAN

Diane Murphy makes a papier-mache elephant at Project Return in Tampa. The center offers mental health services and is celebrating 25 years in the community.

ADVERTISEMENT

By SHERRI ACKERMAN, The Tampa Tribune

Published: February 4, 2008

TAMPA - Paula Jerkins stopped by Project Return to donate a typewriter and soon found herself cornered by one Rhoda Zusman.

Zusman wrangled the do-gooder into volunteering at the mental health center, where disabled clients come for free music therapy, art classes and more. Eighteen years later, Jerkins teaches computers in an adult education class at the center.

When Zusman wanted affordable housing for clients, she spied a shabby apartment complex along Waters Avenue with an auction sign out front. She was on the phone with a bank president that afternoon.

The conversation eventually resulted in the opening of Friendship Palms, six buildings that have provided Project Return clients with low-rent homes for the past 15 years.

Zusman went to lunch once with a wealthy benefactor from Sarasota. By the meal's end, she says, he handed her a check for $50,000.

"I've been very lucky," the 75-year-old grandmother says.

"She doesn't take no for an answer," says Michael Ross, a jazz musician and former volunteer who provided music therapy and now serves as the center's supervisor of services. "We're sort of founded on Rhoda's force of will."

That foundation, which continues, Zusman says, because of her staff and volunteers, will be recognized Feb. 29, when Project Return celebrates its 25th anniversary.

A luncheon at Higgins Hall in Tampa will feature a video presentation of clients, who are known as "members" of what Zusman casually calls the club, with board member Monsignor Laurence Higgins of St. Lawrence Catholic Church attending and Tampa administrator Mark Huey officiating.

"It's a good organization where people can come in freely, become a member and make themselves at home," Higgins says. "It's a marvelous idea that they could become productive and be confident in themselves."

Promoting Self-Sufficiency

More than 300 people a year are helped by the center, which offers a day care setting that also includes vocational training, rehabilitation, counseling and guidance at no cost to members.

"We are the only free program in town," says Zusman, a 75-year-old grandmother who retired as the center's executive director about five years ago. "If we were not here, our members would be lying in bed in a nursing home, in jail or in a hospital."

Doris Stanbury was living in an assisted living facility after a bout of depression and anxiety made worse by the death of her husband. The 63-year-old mother of three adult sons was referred to Project Return, where she helped cook daily lunches.

Thirteen years later, Stanbury lives in her own apartment and runs the center's kitchen.

"This is home," she says. "This is where all my friends are."

About 100 people a day enjoy the $1.75 lunch, with some of the herbs, greens and vegetables coming from a garden in back of the center.

Members typically are referred to Project Return by other agencies that deal with mental health services, drug treatment centers, hospitals and families. Some just drop in, Zusman says. The beauty of her agency is there are no time limits.

Clients can participate as long as they like. Some have been coming to Project Return for 20 years or more. Others, such as Norman Marshall, stay for a few years, then reintegrate into the community.

Marshall, a New Orleans Ninth Ward native and Hurricane Katrina survivor, says he suffers from depression and bipolar disorder. His therapy: tilling Project Return's plentiful garden with coffee grounds and harvesting a bounty of turnip and mustard greens, broccoli, eggplant, carrots, bell peppers, tomatoes, and more.

"I love doing this," the 61-year-old said.

Girl Scouts Is Model

It's that enthusiasm for life that Zusman hoped to recapture for her clients when she began the self-help club concept in 1972, honed from a thesis project for her University of Buffalo master's degree.

Later, she moved to California and joined a mental health association to start work on another center. A Girl Scout mother, Zusman says she modeled her program after the popular girl's club.

"This is an educational model, not a therapy model," she says. "We do problem-solving, but we don't sit around and talk about our problems. We do."

Project Return receives the bulk of its $800,000 annual operating budget from grants provided by the Florida Department of Children & Families and U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, county and city funding, and donations.

The remaining income comes from housing fees and program services, says executive director Natalie Mitchels, who came to Project Return as a volunteer while in college.

But funding cuts each year and recent legislative changes will force Project Return to prepare for lean times.

"I'd like to open up three more centers," Zusman says.

Right now, she'll settle for keeping the one center open and perhaps lining up more lunches with community benefactors. Project Return is a place that, for a quarter century now, gives people a purpose, she says.

"We know we're a lifesaver."

IF YOU GO

WHAT: The 25th anniversary celebration luncheon for Project Return, an agency that provides people with mental health services, classes and companionship. The cost is $50 per person; $600 for a corporate table with 10 guests.

WHEN: Feb. 29. Doors open at 11 a.m. Program starts at 11:30 a.m. RSVP by Friday.

WHERE: Higgins Hall, 5225 N. Himes Ave., Tampa

For information, call Project Return at (813) 933-9020.

Reporter Sherri Ackerman can be reached at (813) 259-7144 or sackerman@tampatrib.com.

Share this:

Loading Comments...

Email Print

ADVERTISEMENT