To celebrate the major birthday, the organization will host a “Fun Run” walk-run event at Waterford Oaks County Park on July 24 and a 100th-anniversary gala celebration at Bloomfield Hills Country Club on Sept. 24.
This year, human services organization Oakland Family Services is celebrating 100 years in operation.
The private not-for-profit agency, which works with vulnerable and disadvantaged children, adults and families in Southeastern Michigan, including those in the Jewish community, provides crucial mental health services to the area.
Oakland Family Services began in 1921 as the Michigan Children’s Aid Society Oakland Branch, which launched as a small storefront in Royal Oak to help kids in the foster care system. It offered clothes to kids in need — almost like a “clothing closet,” says president and CEO of Oakland Family Services Jaimie Clayton — and continued to grow over the decades.
Despite multiple name changes, Clayton says the organization’s mission has remained the same. “We never strayed far from keeping the family at the core of what we’ve done for a century,” she explains.
“We expanded from the concept of foster care to family trauma, then expanded that into mental health and early childhood and prevention services.”
Through prevention, education and treatment, Oakland Family Services tackles a variety of issues that impact the Southeastern Michigan community. It provides mental health services, ensures children have safe homes free from neglect and abuse, helps at-risk children gain access to learning, and assists people whose lives have been impacted by trauma or substance abuse.
“We are a full-service nonprofit,” Clayton, 52, explains. She has been with Oakland Family Services for nearly 20 years. “We provide services from pre-birth all the way to older adulthood.”
As an organization founded by women who were passionate about giving back to the community, Oakland Family Services continues to prioritize women in need. “Women’s programming is a priority in the state to be sure that women who have substance-use issues get treatment and can be with their children,” Clayton says.
COVID Anxiety
Though she says the organization prides itself on achieving various milestones over the decades, like its continuous expansion into new services, Clayton believes Oakland Family Services’ biggest accomplishment was staying connected to the community during the COVID-19 pandemic, when substance use and abuse and mental health issues skyrocketed.
“Our doors were closed, but we were open,” she says. “We did not skip a beat during the pandemic. We found a way to provide virtual services and continue to serve all of our populations.”
A survey of 24,155 Michigan residents conducted in April 2020, the beginning of the pandemic, found 79% cited concerns about stress, loneliness, anxiety and/or depression, with 29% indicating that they were “very” or “extremely” concerned about these mental health symptoms.
For the state’s vulnerable population, who already struggled with finding rides to appointments and financial concerns before COVID-19, the pandemic hit especially hard.
“We’ve seen a huge increase of suicide attempts,” Clayton explains. “We had more severe mental health problems with our adolescents because of the isolation from the pandemic and socially from school.”
Though these numbers were “devastating,” Clayton says there was one silver lining of the pandemic: A switch to virtual appointments gave more people access to care who weren’t able to find transportation or childcare to attend in-person appointments at Oakland Family Services.
“The demand went up for services,” she explains. “The people who were getting mental health treatment during the pandemic tended to engage more in our sessions as well.”
Jewish Links
Clayton says Oakland Family Services opens its doors to everyone, including the Jewish community. As the organization’s president, Clayton, who is Jewish and attends Temple Israel, says the agency has partnered with JVS and Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Detroit in the past.
Yet as a non-denominational organization, it simply strives to provide services to those who need it, while helping to break down the stigma around mental health and substance abuse treatment.
With 100 years under its belt, Oakland Family Services is now looking to the next 100 years and how it can continue to serve the Southeastern Michigan community.
To celebrate the major birthday, the organization will host a “Fun Run” walk-run event at Waterford Oaks County Park on July 24 and a 100th-anniversary gala celebration at Bloomfield Hills Country Club on Sept. 24.
“If we could make it the last 100 years, survive the pandemic and come out in just as good of a position,” Clayton says, “having treated and provided a safety net for our community, then we can be here for 100 more.”
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