Cooking up a recovery through work
May 1, 2010
Terrence Belford
SPECIAL TO THE STAR
George Brown College
About three years ago, Paul Medeiros’s downward seven-year spiralling dance with cocaine came to an abrupt end. He was convicted of defrauding his employer and sentenced to house arrest.
“It was a pretty dramatic wake-up call,” says Medeiros, now 31. And not just a singular epiphany that told him he had to shake a habit that had built to snorting 2.5 grams of white powder up his nose every day.
Medeiros would have to rebuild his life.
Not an easy task for an ex-drug addict and convicted felon.
But Medeiros admits to a major lucky break. He found out about programs at George Brown College targeted at helping people with addiction or mental health problems re-enter the workforce. There are two: an assistant cook’s extended training course and a construction craft workers extended training course.
“I had always enjoyed cooking, and, although my dream was always to get into broadcasting, I thought this might be a great way to establish myself again and to put the past behind me,” he says.
Establishing a stable platform for the future is crucial for recovering addicts and those with mental health problems, says Pat Capponi, social activist, author and someone with more than a nodding acquaintance with mental health issues. Over the years she has been hospitalized about seven times and has written movingly about those experiences.
“There are an enormous number of people in need out there,” she says. “The problem with addiction and mental health problems is that they breed isolation. You go on welfare or disability and there is not enough money to do anything, so you stay in your room.
“That just deepens that terrible sense of isolation and the problems spiral downward. A big part of the key to recovery is the ability to work — to get out of the house, to start building that sense of self-worth — even if it is only a minimum-wage job.”
George Brown is not the only one offering options for recovering addicts and mental health survivors, Capponi says. There are also groups such as The Ontario Council of Alternative Businesses, which helps recovering psychiatric patients create their own businesses. To date, the group has launched the Raging Spoon Restaurant, Out of This World Café & Espresso Bar and Parkdale Green Thumb Enterprises.
“In the old days, they just told us to go away and live on welfare or disability,” says Capponi. “Now they have begun to realize work is the key to recovery, or at least to living successfully.”
Work as a key to recovery is a philosophy George Brown embraces, says Tony Priolo, manager of augmented education programs. “The goal is to help people reintegrate into society,” he says.
Both the assistant cook and construction worker courses involve in-class training — nine months for the cook’s program and six months for construction workers — plus an internship to gain hands-on experience. Those who are accepted pay no tuition and most receive financial support through various forms of disability payments, Priolo says.
“The downside is that we can only take 30 at a time in each course,” he adds. “To date, that means selecting just 30 people out of about 100 applicants.”
The courses also include some basic life-skill instruction: How to organize time, how to craft a résumé and look for a job and even how to prepare nutritious meals and manage an apartment.
At the end of the course, George Brown helps the students find jobs.
“Among cooking graduates, between 70 per cent and 80 per cent have been able to find permanent work when they graduate,” Priolo says. “Placement for the construction workers has been somewhat lower; first, the course is relatively new, and, second, the construction industry is only now starting to recover from the recession.”
Paul Medeiros has come back to George Grown as a volunteer to teach fundamentals of healthy cooking to construction-worker students.
“Right now, I am starting a consulting business,” he says. “After graduation last fall, I immediately got a job working for Marc Thuet at his restaurant, Conviction. But the pace and pressure was really starting to get to me, so I decided to go on my own.
“I already have one client at Yonge and College Sts., and I am helping them expand their menu into Asian dishes.”
He credits the support of his parents, with whom he lives, and the George Brown program with helping him dramatically change his life.
“Both have helped me back onto the straight and narrow,” he says. “I think from here on in I am going to be just fine.”
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