Saturday, April 8, 2006

CLEAN at 20: Fund Raising Is Key to Continued Success

By Angela Jones
The Winchester Star

A lot has changed in 20 years.

In 1986, two grassroots organizations — Operation CLEAN, a law enforcement group, and the Community Core Team, a group of professionals — and Kids Are Our Concern created the coalition now known as CLEAN Inc.

Community and Law Enforcement Against Narcotics Inc. is not only celebrating its 20th anniversary of serving the people of Winchester and Frederick and Clarke counties, but it is also looking ahead to the future.

With a relatively new executive director and chairman of the board in position, the organization is at the beginning of what Ciro Grassi calls a “new era” for CLEAN.

Ciro Grassi

Approaching his one-year anniversary as executive director, Grassi said changes are taking place the organization has never experienced.

“It started out as just a volunteer organization doing a lot of public awareness type work. It’s kind of evolved over the years where now we’re doing direct services that they didn’t do in the past.

“We are a federal grant recipient of the Drug Free Community Support Program and that gives us the opportunity to do all of these activities to be an anti-drug coalition,” Grassi said.

“We now have nine employees where before it was all volunteers. More than half are in the direct service field. Many of these types of coalitions across the country don’t do any type of direct service.”

CLEAN is part of the Community Anti-Drug Coalition, which is, by definition provided by the Community Anti-Drug Coalition of America, “a formal arrangement for collaboration between groups or sectors of a community, in which each group retains its identity but all agree to work together toward a common goal of building a safe, healthy, and drug-free community.”

But Grassi said CLEAN goes beyond that by also focusing on underage drinking, tobacco usage, anger management, and shoplifting.

The goal of these efforts is to help youth make healthy choices.

“We do that through programs that we run through the schools. We have what’s called the Student Assistance Program where we have our counselors going to the schools and they facilitate support groups.

“We also have classes here for parents and teenagers to attend together called Connecting Teens and Parents. Our counselors also run those programs. They’re open to the general public,” Grassi said.

“We also provide those for families referred through the court system. We also provide the anger management and shoplifting classes for them as well.

“Right now, we’re using five people to do both the classes and the support groups. They’re all employees of ours. We don’t contract out.”

Linda Jones, CLEAN program manager, said the target audience for these classes are students ages 12 to 18.

Clare Ruysen of Winchester is the educational programs coordinator at CLEAN Inc. in Winchester. The organization, which teaches families the dangers of drug and alcohol abuse, celebrated its 20th anniversary with a banquet Friday evening.
(Photo by Jeff Taylor)

School counseling groups average eight students per group while the on-site educational programs can vary from two to 10 participants.

Many clients have had some sort of incident occur in their lives.

“Unfortunately, a lot of times an incident has come up and the courts have referred them or a parent says, ‘My child is really having some problems and I need some help’,” Jones said.

“Although we try to be proactive by getting out messages and things in the community, the clients that we come in direct contact with usually have had some sort of incident that brings them to us.”

James Stevenson of the Northwestern Regional Juvenile Detention Center was also recently elected chairman of the board. He said there are times his two roles intertwine.

“What we see here at detention is the kids that are getting locked up — I would say if you lock up 10 kids, seven out of those 10 kids have some sort of substance abuse, drug abuse type issues,” he said.

“I think CLEAN can really help that out with getting them educated. Not only educating the kids, but educating the parents.”

He said kids today are getting into harder drugs than they were in the past. “Back when I was in high school, it was going out to keg parties and occasionally smoking marijuana here and there. That’s nothing (now). These kids are now into crack cocaine and all the big hallucinogenic drugs.”

“And (they’re) getting younger. I have kids getting locked up that are 13 and 14 years old with drug problems.”

To try to stop problems before they arise, CLEAN aims to be a proactive organization, focusing mainly on the education of students and their parents.

“We are designed to be preventative. But again, a lot of that education doesn’t get to the kids until an incident has happened,” Jones said.

“If a child is involved in an incident and they come to the classes, a lot of times getting that kind of information on if you continue to shoplift this is what’s going to happen to you or if you continue to do drugs and alcohol this is what’s going to happen to you.

“Sometimes we get kids who are really in the experimental phases of these things and aren’t established in those cultures. With a little bit of education, a lot of times we can educate them so they can make better choices.”

For the clients who come to CLEAN, there is a cost associated with program participation.

Grassi said payment for the services, which is relatively low, gives the client a sense of ownership. However, the costs are kept low so that paying for the classes doesn’t hinder a client from participating.

As he pointed out, provided education to students ahead of time is far cheaper than providing rehabilitation for an addict.

“It’s far more advantageous to focus on prevention than to worry about treatment,” he said.

The biggest challenge CLEAN faces is funding.

“In the past, we were mainly grant funded. Our classes, our activities were funded by state and local grants. Over the years, the grants dry up. They end one way or another,” Grassi said.

“Now, we have to raise about one-third of our budget through local fundraising. This organization has never done that before. We are working on building that fundraising capacity. It’s difficult. We need to raise $150,000 for this year.

“We’re going to try to get our faces out there in public as much as we can to let people know not only are we here and what we do, but that we need money and their support if they want us to continue what we’ve been doing.”

If the funds cannot be raised, CLEAN will be forced to cut some of its programs.

To make matters worse, another grant the organization receives will end in 2008 forcing CLEAN to raise even more funds on its own.

“The Drug Free Communities Grant from the federal government will only last two more years. Once that’s over, we’ll have to replace that money. Then our fundraising responsibility will go up to $250,000,” Grassi said.

“This takes up the majority of my time as executive director — finding ways to bring in money.”

Grassi said he hopes CLEAN will receive the WINC Chain of Checks this year to help with funding.

Other fundraising opportunities are also being investigated.

“We want to give people value for their donations. We don’t just want to go out into the community with our hands out. We want to be able to show people that they’re getting something for their donation ... not necessarily tangible, but they can see that we’re doing these services for the community and that it’s something valuable for the community,” Grassi said.

Despite the difficulty of raising a substantial amount of money, CLEAN is still celebrating in style.

On Friday, its 20th anniversary banquet was held at Jimmy’s Steak and Seafood Grill.

A logo contest was held at local schools. The winning design, which features a circle of people connected with hearts holding hands around the globe, was drawn by Taylor Henderson, an 8-year-old second-grader at D.G. Cooley Elementary.

The logo has since been incorporated into the CLEAN logo in celebration of the anniversary.

In addition, the Youth Advisory Council is holding a battle of the bands at the Youth Development Center on April 22.

“We have some other things in mind that are still in the conception stages,” Grassi said.

If nothing else, Grassi said he wants people to know that CLEAN is an organization that cares.

“We have been around all these years and the people who are still working with us, the people who are on our board of directors and our advisory council are people who have been in this community for the past 20, 25, 30 years. They’re going to be keeping this as their home for the next 10, 15, 20, 30, however many more years and they care about what goes on this town,” he said.

“And not just the town — the county, Frederick County and Clarke County.

“With all the changes that are going on here and all the people that are moving in, we have to work even harder to try to keep the small town feel of Winchester.”