The plight of drug and alcohol addicted mothers may seem a distant concern in the world of oil and gas. For Sylvia Barnes, managing director of Merrill Lynch & Co., the struggles are never out of mind. When, in 2000, she was looking to get involved in the Houston community, she looked for something that involved more than just a monetary contribution. She was looking for something that required personal time and talent. She wanted to be involved in a charity “that would allow me to make a difference,” she said. “I was looking to help women and children that really were in tough situations.”
After discussions with friends and various institutions, she was told that if it was “tough” she wanted, then Santa Maria was the place to go. “I learned why when I visited for the first time in December of 2000 at a Christmas party at an old house just off North Main,” she said.
She witnessed a place that was clearly making a difference by giving women and children a place to stay and helping mothers get clean and sober. The center serves people that have nowhere else to go. “In large part, if you get there...you’re at the end of your rope,” Barnes said. The average demographic is a 30-year-old female who has been in and out of other treatment facilities several times, with a number of children from a variety of fathers...a tough story.
While she is now vice chairman of the board of Santa Maria Hostel Inc. and chairman of Santa Maria Foundation, Barnes started off babysitting as a volunteer on Saturday afternoons while the mothers were in classes. She jokingly said “I was demoted from babysitter to board member.”
Since then Santa Maria has grown by leaps and bounds. The mission is to empower women and mothers to become alcohol- and drug-free and redefine their life skills. The center provides a continuum of programs to enable the women to ultimately achieve self-sufficiency. These include parenting skills, family strengthening skills, and a 12-step program for the women, and prevention classes for the children. The women that come to Santa Maria are intensely surrounded by services, training, and health care. Basic items such as food and clean sheets can start them down the road towards getting their lives together.
The center is focused on addressing the needs of these women who want to reclaim their lives and break the cycle of addiction. “I’ve learned about addiction, it’s a disease and so many of our clients, their mothers and grandmothers were users. The cycle of addiction causes so much trauma in the family for the children,” said Barnes. On the outside, if the moms are addicted, the kids have severely limited opportunities.
Santa Maria’s success rate far surpasses state and national averages. Barnes attributes this, in part, to the ability of the center to keep the women with their kids for up to 90 days. Many come to Santa Maria because of Child Protective Services (CPS). The mothers value our ability to get their kids back with them. They use it as motivation to stay clean and sober. No matter how badly they’ve been treated, the kids want to come back to their mothers.
Clients learn new parenting skills as part of their stay at Santa Maria.
Most funding comes from the state of Texas Department of State Health Services and the United Way, but the center does rely some on contributions and volunteer services. This comes into play when a woman enters the center pregnant, but with no other children. The government puts tight restrictions on its contributions.
The state will fund a woman with a child for 90 days, but will only fund a woman for 30 days if she is pregnant with no other children. The center then must find the money to keep a pregnant woman for 90 days or until she delivers. “If we can keep a mother from delivering a fetal alcohol syndrome baby or a crack addicted baby, we can save the health care system tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars,” Barnes stated.
Santa Maria has been around for 50 years. It started off as a small venture with a group of nuns helping ladies that had been thrown out on the street. Santa Maria would give them a place to stay. Over the years, it metamorphosized into a non-denominational United Way organization with the purpose of serving mothers and their children.
When Barnes started on the board in 2000 the center consisted of a small house with a small kitchen that held 30 women. Recently, the organization acquired a 2-story apartment building in Spring Branch that now serves 129 people. This is in addition to the original house on North Main that has been renovated to include a well-equipped kitchen, playground and accommodations for 40 women.
As far as the future of the women who’ve been treated and the center itself, Barnes is optimistic. “We have currently about 200 women classified as outpatients,” she said. While, as you can imagine, the women that have resided in the center sometimes have trouble staying at the same address or gaining access to email, Barnes says they keep track of them as long as they can. The center keeps stats and tries to keep contact with the women for 6 months or more. After 6 months, the approximate success rate is about 80%.
As for the ambitions of Santa Maria itself, long-term goals include building or buying a “transition house” facility for women to receive extended care-a place where they could then transition fully to an independent life, attend school, go to work, and still be within the radius of Santa Maria.
“Our budget is over $5 million a year, yet we’re very low key. Not many people are aware of Santa Maria, but they do a tremendous service to the Houston community,” Barnes stated.
