David Zeiss has played many roles at White Bird Clinic. He has been a volunteer and a crisis worker, he recently retired from being a board member and he managed CAHOOTS for its first 25 years of service in Eugene.
Zeiss tells us about his experience at the Clinic, some of the challenges that have been faced, such as blending medical and crisis work, and the complications of bottom-up approach to serving the community meeting national demands.
To find out more about White Bird Clinic, visit whitebirdclinic.org.
David Zeiss has played many roles at White Bird Clinic. He has been a volunteer and a crisis worker, he recently retired from being a board member and he managed CAHOOTS for its first 25 years of service in Eugene.
Zeiss tells us about his experience at the Clinic, some of the challenges that have been faced, such as blending medical and crisis work, and the complications of bottom-up approach to serving the community meeting national demands.
To find out more about White Bird Clinic, visit whitebirdclinic.org.
I was making a living probably doing something like odd jobs or something or some work that really I didn't think of as being who I was. And wipers seemed like something of value to do and proved to be
Unknown:a good community to be part of.
Hana Francis:You're listening to white bird mutual aid. I'm Hana Francis. We speak with white bird clinic staff and volunteers, as well as participants and other organizations who provide essential services to our community. This episode, David Zeiss, who recently retired from the board, and eight years before that retired from being the Cahoots coordinator, speaks about his time at wiper clinic and some of the challenges and triumphs over the years.
David Zeiss:So, my name is David Zeiss and I have a long involvement with white bird in various ways, going back to the early 70s. And I have now retired twice. First time was a little over eight years ago, I retired from my job as a white bird employee, or I had been an employee at that point for all probably over 20. Let's see, over 32 years, okay, and, and then I joined the board of directors, and decided not to put my name in the hat to be re chosen for another term, the character of, of white bird, and, of gouttes and of the board has changed quite a bit since I retired eight years ago, mainly because of growth. And it's, it's becoming, especially on the board, not not the work of employees, but on the board. It's becoming really sort of abstracted administrative, and not what I really have ever, especially enjoyed doing abstracted Administrative Committee stuff like reading and approving a 200 page pile of HIPAA regulations, which isn't something I ever did for fun.
Hana Francis:David Zeiss retired from his position as board member of whiteboard clinic in 2023. He served on the board for several years, and before that he was a volunteer, a crisis worker and was coordinator of Cahoots for its first 25 fledgling years. Cahoots is the Department of wiper clinic that hosts the mobile crisis intervention unit. There are one or two vans on the street at any time. And each van is a crisis worker and a medic that work as a team to respond to crises. These vans are dispatched by the Eugene emergency line for Eugene. And by the non emergency line in Springfield.
David Zeiss:I walked in the door sometime around 1972 or 73. Interested in a place to connect with an organization that was doing good. And I was a volunteer for oh, I don't know if something around five or six years, got involved and other things and was not volunteering very much. I'll usually coming back to help staff the country fair for white bird. And then in 1986, I got hired as a crisis worker, just a member of the crisis team and did that for several years, just that for several years. And in 1989, we had the opening to create CAHOOTS, which we thought of as an expansion basically of the crisis intervention that White Bird had been doing since 1969. With funding for the first time to do to realistically do mobile crisis intervention, and I helped get that off the ground and then was the manager of that for its first 25 years until I retired and also was a crisis worker on the CAHOOTS van for the bulk of that time. Originally, the mobile crisis work was part of the crisis department. It was just on a smaller scale. But as the years went on, it developed into its own department with funding from the city. David Zeiss has been one of the instrumental players in getting CAHOOTS on the street and acting as a go between between city bureaucracies and White Bird Clinic. David facilitated and witness much of the growth of White Bird Clinic and CAHOOTS. So White Bird started doing crisis intervention in 1969 and made it an effort to do both phone and walk in and mobile. But with almost no paid staff relying on volunteers, and we developed a training program to train people to do that. As time went by, it became harder and harder to mount the mobile part. Without funding, it became harder to get committed volunteers because of economic changes, basically. It was just harder to live in Eugene without a full time job. And people have less time to devote to volunteer work. So the mobile part of Crisis Intervention fell away. But it was at least a little bit funded. Crisis intervention was funded by government agencies from, I'm not sure when, but back into the, into the 70s, at least. So that the opportunity to mount CAHOOTS as a fully funded mobile crisis intervention program arose because of the work of Bob Dritz, who was the clinic coordinator. For a long time in the 80s, up into the present century, I don't recall the exact dates. He was invited to participate in something called the task force to develop something called the Public Safety long range plan for the city of Eugene. And he got the concept of mobile crisis intervention connected to the 911 system, written into that plan, thinking that the plan was just going to sit on a shelf for five or 10 years and then get tossed. And for various historical reasons that I'm not really well qualified to speak about. At some point in around 1988, or 1989, The city of Eugene actually pulled the plan off the shelf and read it, and decided to implement some parts of it. And to put a little bit of money into it. And a little bit, at first was to fund CAHOOTS to operate for 40 hours a week. And so it was a strange relationship, because we, we were... I've gotten in trouble for saying this before, we were a sort of anarchic bunch of hippies, and, and didn't always have a real warm relationship with the Eugene police. And especially when it became clear to line officers that money that could have been used to hire some more police officers was going to wiper to hire cahoots. And we were we were also wary about getting into a close relationship with the police. So it worked out remarkably well. And I was in charge basically, of managing that relationship for 25 years. That's most of what I did, I think, or not that it - it wasn't that hard. The police are actually a fairly easy agency to work with compared to all the other relationships I was managing.
Hana Francis:After working with the city of Eugene for many years, kahootz expanded to serve the metropolitan area of our neighboring town, Springfield, this change occurred right at the end of David cites his time working at CAHOOTS.
David Zeiss:Probably the real significant thing was 25 years of delivering the service in Eugene and proving its value to people in Lane County, notably to people at Lane County Mental Health Division. And then, the money sort of fell in our lap. There was a federal appropriation under a law whose name I don't recall that that created some funding for mobile crisis intervention. And the state of Oregon got its share and invited applications from each county only from county governments. And Lane County Mental Health Division was very clear that what they wanted was something on the glutes model which was somewhat different from what the people who wrote the RFP for the state seemed to have had in mind. Because the CAHOOTS model was not well known outside of Eugene at that point. So we wrote the grant and the state accepted that and that was our first funding to go outside the city limits and Eugene. We got the grant and done the hirings and done a bunch of the training when I retired, but hadn't actually got on the road in Springfield until shortly after my retirement.
Hana Francis:This expansion was a big step for the agency. It meant that more people understood the value of mobile crisis intervention. These days, crisis intervention is a pretty common term. But for many years, to the world outside of White Bird Clinic, even within Eugene, there's very little understanding of what it meant.
David Zeiss:A lot of people, a lot of the community know what CAHOOTS does and have some idea of what crisis intervention is because of the hoods. And white bread has always done crisis intervention, but raising awareness of what that phrase even means crisis intervention has been a long, slow slog. Like I used to go to my college reunions and say, I was running a crisis intervention program, I always have to then explain what in the world that means. And it may be hard today to imagine Eugene and Springfield without CAHOOTS, but really it took us 25 years at least, to get the public acceptance to even get having CAHOOTS funded for 24 hours a day operation. And even to get it funded for operations field. It was a fortunate chance the city of Eugene in 1989, was willing to fund it from the city of Eugene and that funding has kept up and expanded.
Hana Francis:One of the parts of CAHOOTS specific crisis intervention that was the hardest for people to get used to, was the combination of a crisis worker and a medic. This model was developed through the early years of doing crisis response before White Bird Clinic developed into different departments. It just made sense to the folks providing this work that there would be someone there to respond to the mental health of the individual in crisis, and someone there for the physical health. Also, having a two person team is useful for a number of reasons, including de escalation practices, and supporting one another. I think maybe the biggest shift in and for us personally, wasn't the relationship with the police. It was the serious blending of mental health and substance abuse and medical primary medical services.
David Zeiss:Because we were.. the CAHOOTS model, as you probably know, includes a mental health specialist with special expertise in crisis intervention, and a medic who is typically an EMT, or a paramedic, sometimes a nurse, working as a team. And that has been a transformative experience both for medics, book cars, emergency medics and paramedics and emergency medical technicians and paramedics work in what is of necessity a relatively mechanistic branch of medicine, because they're dealing with medical emergencies where there are physical procedures that have to be done, and have to be done quickly and have to be done right. And they're really focused on those physical interventions. Whereas crisis intervention is just the ultimate kind of touchy feely empathy and support kind of thing. And working together has led to the development of those skills seeping across that major division. So we have humanistic medics and medically aware crisis workers, who, for example, are much more able to recognize and respond appropriately to physical medical causes of odd behavior, for example, spotting stroke symptoms quickly whereas previously, we we might not have been so good at that. And also, when, when we began, there was almost no contact between mental health agencies and substance abuse agencies. White Bird theoretically, had both. We had mental health services like crisis intervention and counseling, and also Chrysalis. But Chrysalis was a sort of odd substance abuse program as local substance abuse programs go. Probably much better, but not in the mainstream. And still, we were sort of siloed there, there wasn't a lot of professional interaction between our mental health programs and Chrysalis and CAHOOTS than was thrown right into the middle. Negotiating not only the mental health system, but also several times a day interacting with Buckley Center, Willamette Family and other substance abuse agencies, much more much more deeply and much more frequently than White Bird had ever done before. And having to learn that system and to communicate with that system. And with the mental health system and with the emergency medical system, like the emergency room, and EMS, and with the police. So we became the pivotal agency linking all those formerly really separate systems. The separation between mental health and substance abuse is much less now generally in the United States, and more than it used to be, but it used to be really, really stark division with different, different cultures and people in different agencies just couldn't understand each other's language. I think most of the change nationally has come from national legislation and regulation rather than from the bottom up kind of approach that we were working. But our bottom up approach had a significant effect in Eugene, I think.
Hana Francis:Different models of medical crisis intervention vary a lot. There's a lot of debate around many aspects of the services depending on who's providing it, and what the aim of the work is. One of the big areas of debate is around power dynamics. For example, if the police are part of the crisis intervention team are separate. And if there's a licensed psychotherapist, who has the authority to prescribe medication, if the team has the authority to move the client against their will, etc. The CAHOOTS model is based around giving the client the most autonomy possible, they do not have the authority to move the client without their consent. However, it is important to hold in mind that if you call the 911 line to get CAHOOTS, the dispatchers may decide to dispatch police instead of or in addition to CAHOOTS workers. In part due to the general attitude of person-centered crisis response, the history of working with the police and being one of the oldest existing models of mobile crisis intervention in the state's CAHOOTS has gotten a lot of national attention in recent years, especially since the uprising in 2020, spurred by the murder of George Floyd. David Zeiss had retired from CAHOOTS long before this had occurred. But there was already interest spreading in the Pacific Northwest around this model.
David Zeiss:The national interest was just beginning as I was on my way out the door. We had had some contracts with the city of Olympia, looking to create a CAHOOTS like program that arose because somebody I knew as a police lieutenant who was our contract manager for CAHOOTS in Eugene, for a few years, got a job as Chief of Police in Olympia, and was impressed enough with CAHOOTS that he wanted to create something similar in Olympia. CAHOOTS is a good idea and it's in some ways replicable in other cities. And a lot of what we at White Bird have historically thought of as essential, probably isn't very replicable. You can't create a consensus govern worker collective by government fiat it has to grow naturally and to become strong enough, and organized enough, to mount a well run mobile crisis intervention program for a city of any size takes a pretty strong and historically a well established and big organization. So, I think as CAHOOTS is replicated or semi replicated in other cities, it will become more of a bureaucratically structured organization more hierarchical, often it will be staffed by government, by government employees, it will be part of government. Just like police and fire and ambulance are part of government.
Hana Francis:Yeah, and do you think that it will have a similar amount of impact with that backing?
David Zeiss:It will change... It will be a good thing. It will change things even if it's a part of city government.
Hana Francis:That's good to hear.
David Zeiss:I mean, municipal government definitely makes mistakes.
Hana Francis:What's so special about White Bird and CAHOOTS is that it is really just people who see humans as humans and see them as people who need care.
David Zeiss:It is and it's also it's alsosome valuable and essential if we want to replicate CAHOOTS in other cities to think of it as something that you can write a manual for that will actually tell people how to do it. And that you can write regulations for about how it must be done. starting up a new CAHOOTS-like programming or how the city would be a very different thing from the way we started, we just picked our most experienced crisis workers and some good medics, and put them in a van and told them to go and we were learning something every time we got in the van.
Hana Francis:Though the goal of CAHOOTS has not been to change society, the culture of Eugene has been affected by the social work that has been occurring for the last 50 years.
David Zeiss:The nature of crisis intervention is that we respond to what's happening, we don't really try to change what's happening except on the very individual atomistic level. Also, we've, we've had significant effects on many people's lives as individuals. And White Bird generally has, has certainly not been a political action agency. We like to think of ourselves as a cultural change agency, at least I do. But that's, that's a very bottom up kind of action, transforming ourselves and transforming our personal relationships, including our professional personal relationships. I think we haven't really changed Eugene as, as a city. As much as we've changed individuals,
Hana Francis:Working in the midst of small scale grassroots organizations, and city government and other more bureaucratic agencies, the Clinic has been faced with many growing pains in recent years.
David Zeiss:Okay, so the big challenge - it seemed like always, the perennial challenge, was keeping it staffed of finding good people who would work out in the roll and who would want to keep doing it in a relatively long run. And we, I think we were always basically struggling to keep our staff up. And that's, I think that's still happening with goods. Getting a big enough salary to interest people to motivate people to stay, to keep doing it, of course, is is the hard part, it's still the hard part. On the other hand, if people are doing just for the money, that's not a good thing, either. So, the challenge, I think that the challenge was being the bridge agency, connecting all those disparate parts of our social service and healthcare service system, that were not very much in communication with each other, and tended to not understand each other. All and learning all of those systems and how to communicate with colleagues in those systems, and how to bridge between those systems.
Hana Francis:David discovered white bird in a way that many do. The community of white bird clinic is something special because we live in a very individualistic culture. So for those of us looking for a community, it is attractive to be part of this collective that wants to do good for the world. However, the collective is changing. As the agency grows, it has become harder to maintain this attitude of small scale community work. Well, it has been beneficial to have more funding for the whiteboard clinic programs. And more recognition is good for awareness of the services and the issues which make the services necessary. It has come with a different set of difficulties. These are among some of the challenges that white Bird Clinic faces and continual change. You also mentioned changes happening within CAHOOTS and within White Bird. What have you noticed in in White Bird as a whole?
David Zeiss:Well, White Bird is bigger by at least an order of magnitude than it was when I started.
Hana Francis:I believe there is like 250 employees now.
David Zeiss:Yeah, yeah. When I started there were maybe a dozen. That, but that's back in the 70s. So that that's an enormous change. And it has been a challenge. Most most of the growth a large part of the growth has happened since I retired. That was starting to happen as I was on the way out the door. The larger number of people as really tested our historical approaches to management. Our management style used to be based mostly on lots of interpersonal daily interpersonal contacts. When we were housed, the whole agency was housed just in the two houses on East 12th. And we would basically all see each other and talk to each other, more or less daily. And that doesn't work when you get up approaching 200 people or above 200 people. So it's been a challenge for White Bird to to develop management systems that will preserve the values that we aim to embody, but still function with a larger organization that still work in progress.
Hana Francis:It is my hope that we will be able to gracefully negotiate the grassroots demands of this collective with the more bureaucratic needs of a growing agency to get competitive wages that show respect and value to this important work and to always prioritize the needs of our clients. Acknowledging that our staff can become clients if they're not properly provided for. David said it right. We are still a work in progress. Thanks to David Zeiss, for the many years that he is dedicated to White Bird Clinic and to bettering his community. If you have any comments or questions please feel free to reach out to me. A whitebirdmutualaid@gmail.com Thank you for listening to White Bird Mutual Aid. I'm Hana Francis.