Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Joel Corcoran: Welcome, Needed, and Valued: The Clubhouse Approach
Wed, 07 May 2025
Send us a textClubhouse International is transforming lives through intentional communities where people with mental illness rebuild their lives after disruption and isolation.Joel Corcoran joins us to tell the Clubhouse story.• Clubhouse International operates 377 clubhouses across 32 countries using a specific 37-standard model• Members voluntarily participate in work-ordered days that provide structure, purpose, and skill development• Employment program achieves 40% employment rate compared to national average of 15% for people with mental illness• Education support helps members return to school at all levels from basic adult education through advanced degrees• Members receive assistance with housing, healthcare access, and rebuilding social connections• Clubhouses reduce hospitalizations, criminal justice involvement, and early mortality while improving overall wellbeing• Members determine their own level of participation based on their needs and recovery journey• Future goal is to triple the number of clubhouses by 2030 to reach more isolated individualsVisit clubhouse-intl.org to find a clubhouse in your community, take a tour, volunteer, or advocate for expanded mental health resources.https://tonymantor.comhttps://Facebook.com/tonymantorhttps://instagram.com/tonymantorhttps://twitter.com/tonymantorhttps://youtube.com/tonymantormusicintro/outro music bed written by T. WildWhy Not Me the World music published by Mantor Music (BMI)
Chapter 1: What is the Clubhouse International and who is Joel Corcoran?
Hopefully, you gain more awareness, acceptance, and a better understanding for autism around the world. Hi, I'm Tony Mantor. Welcome to Why Not Me? The World, Humanity Over Handcuffs, The Silent Crisis special event. Today we're joined by Joel Corcoran, Executive Director and CEO of Clubhouse International, a global network of over 370 clubhouses across 32 countries.
Clubhouse International provides individuals living with mental illness a supportive community, offering opportunities for friendship, employment, housing, education, and access to medical and psychiatric services in a caring, safe environment. Joel is here to share insights about this transformative organization. Thanks for coming on. Sure.
Could you give us an overview of your organization, your responsibilities, and the goals you have?
Chapter 2: How does the Clubhouse model support mental health recovery?
I'm the director of the CEO of Clubhouse International. And Clubhouse International is an organization that is committed to ending isolation, both economic and social, for people living with mental illness, in particular people living with serious mental illness.
And the way that we do that is by helping to grow the number and the quality of clubhouse rehabilitation programs, a rehabilitation program called Clubhouse. A clubhouse is an intentional community. It's a voluntary place where people living with mental illness, again, by and large, people with serious mental illness, but anybody with a history of mental illness is welcome.
It's designed to be a community that is rich with opportunities for people to rebuild their lives and reclaim their futures after having been so dramatically disrupted by an illness. People living with mental illness are typically separated from many of the things we all take for granted. They get marginalized and they've usually not finished school, but not always.
They've had their early lives interrupted. In most cases, they lose family, they lose friends, they lose access to employment or money. And a lot of times, maybe the worst thing is they lose hope for the future.
So the clubhouse is this place where people who are typically not welcomed in other places are not only welcomed, but they're welcomed and needed and given repeated opportunities to participate, to engage with others. to rebuild social networks. But the clubhouse, it's more than that. It's an opportunity system. So people, when they come to us, they're usually not at their best.
They're usually been dealing with the difficulties of mental illness in many different ways. And when they come to us, they're looking for help or they're looking for a place to be safe and welcomed. And we provide that. That's really important.
Yes, that sounds really good. What else do you help them with?
Beyond that, the clubhouse provides so many opportunities that help people rebuild their lives. First and foremost, it's a comfortable place to be. You can come in and just have a cup of coffee if you want to, just talk to somebody, or just sit if you want to. You can also get help accessing needed services, health care, mental health care, social services.
While the clubhouse doesn't provide any kind of a treatment or clinical services, it certainly helps clients community helps each member. That's what we call people who come to Clubhouse as members.
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Chapter 3: What opportunities does the Clubhouse provide for education and employment?
At our clubhouses, about 40% of the people who participate at a clubhouse each day are employed in jobs in the community, integrated into businesses with all kinds of employers, pay the prevailing wage, and are given the opportunity to start to build a career and to do things that they want again. And that's important to a lot of people living with mental illness.
If you talk to folks, one of the top two or three life goals is usually, I want to have a job where I'm getting paid, where I can contribute, where I can do something important. And so clubhouses have aggressive and successful employment program. There's also an evening weekend social program to help people rebuild social connections.
When your life gets disrupted by mental illness, you often lose your friends and your family and your connections. Far too often people are alone, living in an apartment alone or living at home with their parents and not able to come out and participate in the world. So having that social network again is really important. So Tony, when you say, what do we do?
We provide this over the top support for people living with mental illness and give them repeated opportunities to build success and to recover. And we do it in a way where we're sharing the work. There's a small professional staff that works at clubhouses, but they work as colleagues.
with members, and members of the clubhouse, people living with mental illness, are involved in every aspect of it. That shared work is what we think is restorative, and that's the crux of what our program is, being part of something with other people and contributing to the success of the group while at the same time building success for yourself.
How long has the clubhouse been in operation, and what's its history of development and growth?
That's a great question. The clubhouse started in 1948, so over 75 years ago, in Manhattan. With a single clubhouse, a group of people who had been released from a state psychiatric hospital began to gather in New York City where they lived. They recognized each other in the hospital, and they formed an organization to help each other.
They didn't want it to sound like a psychiatric program and get the stigma associated with that, so they called it the Juana Society, W-A-N-A, and that stood for We Are Not Alone. And the concept was we're stronger and more likely to build success when we're working together rather than going in alone.
They formed this club, this society, which eventually, with the help of some wealthy volunteers who were committed to helping this group of people, they bought a building that had a fountain in the backyard and they renamed themselves Fountain House. Falcon House was the first clubhouse operating on 47th Street in Hatton, and it's still there today. Very successful.
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Chapter 4: How did the Clubhouse concept begin and evolve?
you kind of beat me to the punch. My next question was, is it regional, national, or international? So you've answered that, it's international. So can you expand on how many there are and where they might be?
Today, there are 377 clubhouses in 32 countries on all six continents, across six continents, I should say. There are about 220 in the United States and another 150 outside the United States.
That's great. That's really good to hear what an impact you are making. Now, are all the clubhouses around the world modeled in the same way? And of course, the way that they work with the people that are members?
The answer to that is yes. The clubhouse model of psychosocial rehabilitation is a very specific model. Although the word clubhouse is general and lots of programs or organizations might say club or clubhouse, the clubhouse model is very specific. It's been developed and organized and improved over 75 years. The clubhouse operate on the basis of 37 organizations.
best practice standards the international standards for clubhouse programs and these programs these standards describe how we work with each other how we treat each other what the opportunity system is in a clubhouse how clubhouses are structured how clubhouses are governed what the business of a clubhouse is and so these 37 best practice standards were consensually developed by clubhouses
Meaning members, people living with mental illness, staff, people who volunteer on boards. These standards were developed and they're updated every two years. A rather cumbersome but important process of seeking consensus about what are the best practices. And they were first promulgated back in 1989 and have been updated every two years since then.
Clubhouses are trained on the basis of these standards and evaluated on the basis of these standards. If you go to any clubhouse in the world, you'll find the standards posted on the wall or on the tables or part of the meetings where people are talking about them all the time. For example, the first standard clubhouse membership is a voluntary and without time limits.
When someone becomes a member of a clubhouse, they do it because they want to. You can't get too sick or too healthy to be a member of a clubhouse. Once you have a clubhouse, you can always use that clubhouse. And people do. They use it a lot when they need it most, and they use it less when they don't need it so much.
When someone says they need help, what's the process to bring them into your supportive environment and setting up resources to help them rebuild their life and pursue the vision they originally had and hopefully can attain again for their future?
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Chapter 5: What is the process for joining a Clubhouse?
You get to pick and choose how that works in your life. Members get to pick and choose how they use the clubhouse. As I said, when people first come, typically they're not at their best. It's pretty common for people to be really struggling and be separated and isolated and lonely. And sometimes people will use the clubhouse every day.
People, when they go back to school, they may only come in a couple of times a week to check in with friends or get help with something. Or they may use the most clubhouses will have some kind of system to help with tutoring or studying. But the member will pick what works for them.
Sure, that makes sense. So could you describe when a member first walks through those doors, what do they see first? How is the clubhouse laid out? Can you give us a little bit of a visual on how the clubhouse is laid out?
Well, that's an interesting question. If you go to any clubhouse in the world, if you know what a clubhouse is and you walk into any clubhouse, you could go to one in Tokyo or Pristina, Kosovo or London or Detroit or Richmond, British Columbia, and you'd know that you were in a clubhouse because there's a lot of things that are very similar.
But clubhouses might be in a large office-type building, a commercial building. They might be in an old Victorian building.
home there are clubhouses that have purchased or leased buildings formerly used as firehouses or anything so it can be any kind of a building typically when you walk into a clubhouse there's going to be one or more people right there at a reception desk or reception area who are saying hi joel welcome welcome to clubhouse can i help you and that's for two reasons one is just to remind people that they are welcome there it's a place that they belong
But also it makes sure that the people who come through the door are people who get the help that they need, whether it's someone who's visiting and wants to learn about a clubhouse or someone who just wants to find out what's going on in that building or if it's a potential new member. So there's somebody right there at the door always who can help someone.
And the clubhouse space is usually divided up into sort of the functions of that clubhouse, how that clubhouse is organizing. And oftentimes that has to do with size. Any clubhouse, you'll find a kitchen and a dining room, usually a commercial size kitchen, a clubhouse that has commercial appliances and those kind of things, the average daily attendance at a clubhouse.
is around somewhere between 35 and 45 people a day. And some clubhouses have as many as 300 people a day, and some clubhouses have as few as 10 or 15 people a day, depending on the community and the size of the community and the age of the clubhouse. At every clubhouse, you're bringing people together so there's food service and so there's a kitchen and a dining room.
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Chapter 6: Can a Clubhouse provide housing support?
The role of the staff person in a clubhouse is to engage members, to get to know them, to build a relationship with them. And doing that through shared work is really important. So you'll see people in the kitchen. You won't see people off in one corner by themselves. You'll see people working at a table together, sharing the work, planning the work.
If you see a group of people planning evening and weekend activities for the coming month, They'll probably be sitting around a table together sharing that work. Clubhouses like to use whiteboards. They put everything up there so that anybody who comes in can see what's going on and what work opportunities there are. So you'll see that. You'll see modern office equipment.
In our clubhouses, we talk about making the place image enhancing. So it won't look like a poor, underfunded social service program. Most clubhouses will be the furniture, what's hanging on the walls, the condition of the building, of the property, always image enhancing, fresh and new and modern, working with equipment that they might be working with when they're out employed.
They might be gaining new skills. So there might be a media unit where many clubhouses do podcasts, for example, or make videos or weekly or daily television shows to keep everybody informed about what's going on at the clubhouse and what opportunities are. So you see people working on those kinds of things.
The other thing you'll see is people treating each other with a tremendous amount of respect and dignity and care because the clubhouses are a caring community. It's really very impressive to see how people treat each other with such positive regard and make sure that each other's okay, making sure that people are invited to engage in whatever activity that's going on there.
So you'll see people treating each other very nice.
That's a really impressive statement. What areas do you usually find a clubhouse?
When we talk to a new group about building a clubhouse, we say, you want to have your clubhouse in a place that is easily accessible. Typically, people who are members of clubhouses are living at or near or below the poverty line. You want to be where there's public transportation, where people can get there. So we want to have easy access to employment opportunities.
I know I keep coming back to that, but employment is a cornerstone of the clubhouse model. We want people to be able to access employers, so businesses or public services, or we have folks that are employed in government offices or in libraries or at the local big box store or law firm or accounting office who have people working in jobs where they're being supported there.
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