50+ Summer Break Camps May 26 – Aug. 7
after initial assessments when a woman enters jail. ReMerge’s clinical director meets with the potential client to understand her needs and assess readiness for change. If it’s a good fit, the mother is released to ReMerge. “When you first come in it’s a little overwhelming and asking for help is hard,” said Eastep. “After ReMerge accommodated me and my children so much, I began to trust them and trust the process.” Eastep said ReMerge staff advocates for mothers and provides many incentives and opportunities she didn’t have before coming to the program. “You get that support and transportation and employment and education and housing, all of it,” Eastep said. ReMerge works with community partners to cover the cost of housing for mothers during their first two phases of the program. ReMerge also covers clients’ medical and dental costs. The program has a full-time education and employment coordinator, probation and parole officer, legal aid attorney and health and wellness coordinator, who cooks lunch with the mothers every day. “[We] want to make sure they are really valuing their own health and wellness and taking care of themselves, and we are also teaching them how to model and do that with their children,” said Burkholder.
Preparing for the future OSU-OKC, where Eastep recently completed her first semester toward a degree in addiction counseling, offers a free strategies for success class to the mothers. The University of Central Oklahoma offers a mass communications class for ReMerge participants, focusing on soft skills like email etiquette, social media and maintaining sobriety in the workplace. Burkholder said the average age when a ReMerge mother left home is 15.5, and 20 percent of participants need their GED, for which ReMerge offers tutoring. Thanks to a grant from United Way, ReMerge is launching Courage Cookies, a 12-week program with curriculum focused on entrepreneurship, marketing and inventory management. Participants will also bake cookies twice a week with a mentor. That mentor will become a potential job reference, which is often a barrier for people involved in the justice system. Burkholder said the idea for Courage Cookies developed after program participants said they wanted to be able to work but being at the program the majority of the day, five days a week, made that difficult. “In an effort to not make that work history gap any longer than it needs to be or if they have never had a job history that they can list, we want to get them on that road sooner,” Burkholder said. “We are
Member registration opens 10 a.m. March 23
General registration opens 10 a.m. March 30 See camp descriptions and register at okcontemp.org/camps.
OklahomaContemporary.org 405.951.0000 | @okcontemporary NW 11th and Broadway, OKC
THE ENCOURAGING WORDS ON THE WALL OUTSIDE REMERGE’S NEW LOCATION WERE VOTED UPON BY CLIENTS AND STAFF.
METROFAMILYMAGAZINE.COM / MARCH 2020 21
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