Isabel Byon: 0:00

The New York State Office of Addiction Services and Supports or OASAS, provides this podcast as a public service.

Isabel Byon: 0:07

Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the agency or state. This is Addiction: The Next Step.

Jerry Gretzinger: 0:19

Welcome to another edition of Addiction: The Next Step, the podcast brought to you by the New York State Offices of Addiction Services and Supports. I'm Jerry Gretzinger, your host, and today we are talking more about supporting the workforce. Now we've had several episodes where we've talked about scholarships that are available so that people can pursue their education to be able to provide services and supports, which we know are so critically necessary. There's a workforce crisis. There's not enough people. We want to change that. One of the people that's helping us to do that is Kalisha Smith. She joins us today. Thanks for sitting down with us, Kalisha.

Kalisha Smith: 0:50

Of course, of course.

Jerry Gretzinger: 0:51

So I want you to first tell us who do you work with. What do you guys do?

Kalisha Smith: 0:55

Yeah, so I am Kalisha Smith. I work with the Outreach Training Institute as part of the organization outreach. We have programming in Queens and Long Island, all through Suffolk County, Nassau County and all through the Island. So we provide residential treatment services. We provide outpatient mental health and substance use services. In our brand new CCBHC clinic out in Richmond Hill we have youth residential services, opioid treatment programming and outpatient substance use programming.

Jerry Gretzinger: 1:25

A lot of good services being offered in programming.

Kalisha Smith: 1:27

Yes, yeah.

Jerry Gretzinger: 1:28

So I know today we're here to talk about some unique scholarship opportunities, but before we do that, you know, sometimes it's interesting to find out what drove people to get into this area of work right. I mean, everybody says you have to bring a passion, and sometimes that passion is from you know their experiences with substance use, either on their own or loved ones, and I know some of your information and I just wanted to see if you would share kind of what made you say this is the area of work I want to be doing.

Kalisha Smith: 1:55

Yeah, you know it was a little bit of a while trying to figure out what exactly I wanted to do with my career, and I like to say that this field chose me. I've always been a helper since I was younger and kind of navigated my life with family members who were plagued with addiction or not even knowing what an addiction actually was, until I started to get older, and so I grew up with an individual in my household who used substances and it never showed right. This person was near and dear to me and they still. They were my parent. They still showed all the signs of a parent, a great parent.

Kalisha Smith: 2:39

But on the other side there was substance use happening that we weren't necessarily exposed to or aware of.

Kalisha Smith: 2:48

But now that I'm older and looking back, you see the signs and you're able to connect the dots.

Kalisha Smith: 2:54

And when I did get older, there was transparency in that in my household to help us understand like these are the things that are happening.

Kalisha Smith: 3:02

And when my parents separated, my mom was also very transparent about you know what was going on in the household, and I think that kind of made me want to have more of an impact so that I can help to not only bring awareness, but also kind of like work in a space where we de-stigmatize individuals who have substance use disorders, who have a disease right and who can't necessarily always control some of the things that they are navigating in life. And I like to look at it as you know, in life there's always good and bad, and so individuals are always going to have struggles, and sometimes that struggle is substance use. And so for me, I like that I'm on the other side of that being able to empower individuals to get into our field, being able to teach individuals how to look at humans as a whole person and not just as a person with a disease or as a person with a substance use disorder, but being able to de-stigmatize that for everybody.

Jerry Gretzinger: 4:02

Yeah, yeah, and so I think it's interesting. You talked about how you know. You lived a number of years with this person in your home who is a substance user. I didn't, didn't see the signs. Yeah, and I know. One of the things that you know, we say we can, we can provide to people is information If they are loved ones of someone that they're thinking may be using substances maybe they're not, but to help them understand what those signs are.

Kalisha Smith: 4:27

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely, and that's why it's important for me, in the role that I'm in as a training institute director, to be able to help people get on board with that and also just providing general education. I know OASAS does a great job at this being able to talk about what things might look like right, give warning signs and just give information to the masses to kind of de-stigmatize what we have going on.

Jerry Gretzinger: 4:50

Right, the better we can help people to understand, the less stigma we hope will be in the community. Right, absolutely so. I think it's also interesting too, as we start moving towards the part of the conversation about scholarships. You know we talk about, you know who are the people who work in the addiction field, right, and I know a lot of times we talk about people having lived experience, and that can be someone who may have used substances and went through treatment, is in recovery and now wants to be that person to help others, but at the same time, someone like yourself who lived with someone who is using substances and now feels that passion to make a difference, right, so I mean the people who might be considering this line of work can really run a broad range.

Kalisha Smith: 5:29

Yeah, oh, absolutely. I mean, some of our students do have lived experience. They're motivated by being in recovery and wanting to help in the way that they received care. We have a lot of individuals who are already in the field and you won't believe how many people that are mental health counselors, social workers, marriage and family therapists and don't necessarily know how to treat substance use disorders right, and so we love being able to take individuals in our program and help them learn and understand. How do you provide this treatment? Because the world is moving towards integrated care. There's no such thing as providing a service without somebody coming in and might having some touch of substance use and being able to discern. Is this a problem or is this just normal situations that we're going through? Right?

Jerry Gretzinger: 6:17

So then we get to the part now where someone okay, they may be listening saying, okay, well, let's hear that scholarship information, because we've said this a few different times in other episodes too one of the top barriers someone may have encountered wanting to do this is the cost associated with it.

Kalisha Smith: 6:34

Absolutely. We get applications almost every day at Outreach. We are one of the top training providers in New York State and that is because we provide our program virtually. Now it's live virtual, and so what that means is that we have a platform where individuals will come on online and they'll take our program. We have four different tracks. We have a morning track and three evening tracks, so we make it accessible and with that, what happens is that individuals apply but they may not be able to afford our program.

Kalisha Smith: 7:04

We offer need-based tuition assistance, but we also offer scholarships. Right now we have a scholarship that's covering the full cost of tuition for individuals that live in Suffolk County, and that's our Suffolk County Workforce Development Scholarship. We were afforded a bunch of grants this year. We had a grant from OASAS as well, our Addiction Professional Scholarship Program, and that we ran through that really quickly because it wasn't specific to just Suffolk residents, that was across the state. So anybody who wrote and completed the application was offered an opportunity to get that scholarship, which we are very grateful to OASAS for, and it's our hope that we'll get more funding to provide that scholarship to more people.

Kalisha Smith: 7:46

But the cost is a real, true concern, right? Our program can run up to $6,000, but this scholarship, especially the Suffolk scholarship, is covering the full cost and one of the things that this actually does is create a great pathway for individuals to get into employment, because we not only provide the training for our individuals, we provide all material, all training to get them to the place where they meet the 350-hour requirement to become a CASAC-T. We also place all of our individuals in internships, so we have a robust career development program, a professional development program to get them ready to go into the field, even if they may have had experience. No matter where you are, we provide an internship placement opportunity and those individuals go and work in OASAS licensed programs to provide treatment services. In turn, they learn the 12 core functions of being an addiction professional and they're able to go on and hopefully it's a pathway for them to gain employment after.

Jerry Gretzinger: 8:42

Oh, that's great. And so you were talking about 350 hours. So how long is the course to get to that point, like weeks, months? How long is it?

Kalisha Smith: 8:52

Yeah, so our full program is 12 months. We do have an accelerated program for individuals who have a master's degree in social work, so a degree in social work, mental health, counseling, marriage and family therapy, and also there's another one. But if you have one of the degrees that is acceptable, we'll review and ensure that you meet the requirements. To do a shorter program it's 135 hours and those individuals don't have to go through all of the basics because they would have already had that. They'll provide us a transcript and we'll be able to corroborate that for them. But for anybody else there's a 350 hour program.

Kalisha Smith: 9:30

It runs a span of 12 months and one of the beauties of OTI Outreach Training Institute is that we have rolling admissions, so we we admit students every single month. Right now we are able to take them at different path, at different entry points, and what that means is that you wouldn't have to wait until September to come into our program. So our semester technically is from September to July, but individuals don't have to start in September. So we have a cohort that will begin in January. We take a little break for the holidays in December, but we'll start a new cohort in January, especially for the Suffolk Scholarship. We want to try to get individuals in for that January cohort. So we're telling everybody you know get your applications in for that December deadline so that they can start in January and then they'll go for a full 12 months in our program.

Jerry Gretzinger: 10:19

All right, so the two scholarships we know there's the OASAS one, the Addiction Professional Scholarship, and that's. You know, people can. You may be down in the Brooklyn area, but they can be anywhere and since there's a virtual component they can participate that way. And then there's the county scholarship and that's for people in the county, I assume.

Kalisha Smith: 10:35

Yes, that's for individuals who reside in Suffolk County. We also will help them find internships in the county and that's really to build the Suffolk County workforce. However, our program is open to anybody in New York so you can be anywhere in the state and take our program. We're virtual. You would never have to come into our training Institute. They can do everything online. Our interviews are done remotely, all coordination is done online and they can get right in.

Jerry Gretzinger: 10:59

It opens up opportunity with technology.

Kalisha Smith: 11:01

Yes, listen, people can learn right from the comfort of their home. It makes it accessible, especially when you're trying to navigate real life right and still working in the field as well. You can come right in and still get your training.

Jerry Gretzinger: 11:12

All right, so website, phone numbers. What do you want people to know?

Kalisha Smith: 11:16

Yes, if you go to OPINY. org, you'll see all of our information. We are underneath the Training Institute on the website. It should pop up right in the middle. You'll see a slide that says Outreach Training Institute, or OTI, and they're able to log in and fill out an application and we're accepting applications right now.

Jerry Gretzinger: 11:36

Perfect, all right, Kalisha, thank you so much for sitting down with us.

Kalisha Smith: 11:39

Absolutely.

Jerry Gretzinger: 11:40

Nice to have you here to hear your story and what we can do to help people go to work and do all this important stuff.

Kalisha Smith: 11:44

Absolutely.

Kalisha Smith: 11:45

Thank you so much.

Jerry Gretzinger: 11:46

And once again, you know you can always go to our website as well. That's oasas. ny. gov, O-A-S-A-S. N-Y. G-O-V and the HOPEline 877-8-HOPE-NY. I'm your host, Jerry Gretzinger, for Addiction. The Next Step. Until we see you next time, be well.