Cahaba Center receives grant and expands services

By Mark Autrey

The Cahaba Drop-In Center in Selma has received a $20,000 grant from the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) to expand the center’s activities.

Lewis Fincher was one of the center’s leaders who, with the help of Patricia Martin, Lee Maxwell and others, prepared the grant application. The grant was from the church’s Self Development of People Program which provides groups with resources to help themselves. The grant recipients must plan and direct the program, which the funds support.

“The grant was basically about people helping people,” Fincher said. “After we made the application a committee from the church’s national office came and spent time here and interviewed us. It went really well, especially once they got a feel for who we were and how we managed everything. They especially liked the way we are run by consumers and not really a bunch of outside people”.

Fincher said they should receive the first installment of the grant money in early 2006. One thing the Cahaba group will use the money for its computer training.

“We’re going to get hooked up to the internet,” Fincher said. “That will open up to a lot of educational opportunities and welook forward to that. We’ll also help people learn to manage their personal finances.”

Fincher said the Cahaba Center will also go beyond the traditional arts and crafts programs by getting a ceramics kiln.

“Our members are really excited about that,” Fincher said. “You can really develop your skills making animals, vases and other useful and decorative items. It’s fun and it’s relaxing.”

The money will also fund adult basic education, literacy training, mathematics tutoring, and helping members get their GED (General Educational Development).

“Because of this grant,” Fincher said, “we will be able to hire people from Selma’s George Wallace. We’ll also have outside people coming in to help with arts development. They all do a great job and we’re looking forward to it.”
The Cahaba Consumer Affairs Council was started in 1990, mainly as a weekly support group for people in the Selma area. Founded by Fincher and Lee Maxwell, the group’s earliest meetings averaged around 25 people, with lack of transportation being the main barrier to those who wanted to attend.

“We’d talk about how do we cope with our illnesses, where can we get help, and share strategies of what worked for us,” Fincher said. “It went from being just a group of consumers together, to being a community of people who really cared about each other.”

Fincher said that when the ADMH began encouraging the idea of drop-in centers, under the leadership of Joel Slack and Mike Autrey, the Cahaba group applied for the money and became a chartered group. That was in 1999.

“By that time of course we had grown in the number of people we knew so we began bringing a dish and having food together and getting to be good friends and comfortable with each other. We were helped a lot in this transition by Patricia Martin.”

Fincher said that even while there are more activities and more people, the opportunity to eat and share meals together is still the main bond that holds the group together.

“A lot of people in our community just don’t have anything to eat at home and they can eat here,” Fincher said. “A lot of our members are pretty isolated and they can get down being by themselves so much. But then they can come down here and eat and relax and nobody makes fun of them. It’s just a good environment.”

“This is basically the story we told the Presbyterians,” Fincher said. “We showed them we were doing for each other. That this was about people helping people. And have we grown? Yes. We are now feeding over 100 people a week.”

The Cahaba Center is open five days a week, but the consumers want it open every day. Fun and fellowship has a lot to do with it, but it’s also about the food. And the food is cooked by Lewis Fincher himself.

“My mother taught me how to cook and season food,” he said with a laugh. “We plan all the meals and can go as a group to the Winn Dixie or Wal-Mart or even sometimes from the food bank. And what the people here like is Southern-style cooking.” Fincher said fried chicken is the dish of choice.

“Everyone loves fried chicken here, but we have lots of other things, too. Everyone loves macaroni and cheese, and we cook a lot of spaghetti. We also enjoy collards and cornbread and ham. I fix mashed potatoes and gravy, and just anything you would eat at home. And everyone is welcome.”

Another treat for the group is that they are sometimes catered by Essie’s Place. Essie’s is the cafeteria at Wallace State Community College, and it is also open to the public. Fincher said the food there is “excellent.”

Note: This article published by permission from Listen magazine, a publication of the Alabama Department of Mental Health, Office of Consumer relations.