For Santa Cruz’s most vulnerable, this peer-run clubhouse is a lifeline. Now the county could take it away.

In the late winter of 2020, Ari Hutchison woke up on the sands of a Santa Cruz beach, out of food, out of money, and out of any sense of a future. He was homeless, had recently suffered a mental break after receiving a medical diagnosis, and urgently felt he needed to find a way back to friends and family in Pennsylvania. 

Hunger was setting in, but Hutchison had no ready prospect for food. He then remembered a conversation with a friend he met on the street about a place in Midtown Santa Cruz where he might be able to get a meal. 

Hutchison recalls feeling astonished when he first stepped through the doors of the old church rectory building on Cayuga Street. 

“I remember just thinking, ‘What is this place?’” Hutchison said on a recent May morning.  

The place was the Mental Health Client Action Network of Santa Cruz, a day center for people with self-disclosed mental illnesses — most of them homeless — to drop in and find a sense of structure and refuge from life outside. What makes MHCAN unique among the menu of mental health and homeless services is that it’s peer-run — the only such place in the county. Everyone in the building, including staff and volunteers, is dealing with their own psychological condition, such as schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, and thus exists on even ground, away from the often heavy and prejudicial glare of society. Community forms, and a sense of welcome, staff and clients say, gives way to a sense of healing. Many longtimers in the building credit MHCAN with saving their lives. 

Yet, it might all disappear at the end of June. 

That’s because after 30 years as the main funder of MHCAN, the county government has proposed ending its relationship with the organization. In addition to raising the possibility of a dozen layoffs, staff reductions and services cuts, stormy fiscal waters have led the county’s Health Services Agency to propose redirecting the roughly $587,000 it would spend on MHCAN next year into other state-mandated services. 

“Loss of funding would close MHCAN and the community will lose the only peer-run support center in the county, providing a place for persons experiencing homelessness to get food, use computers, launder and shower,” the budget proposal reads.

No decision is final until the county board of supervisors votes on June 10. The county’s elected officials have asked Health Services Agency staff to present some alternatives to the layoffs and closure of MHCAN. However, when asked for a quick update on those alternatives during a May 20 meeting, HSA Director Mónica Morales told the supervisors she thought, of all other options, the proposed cuts were “the best at this point.” 

If MHCAN doesn’t receive county funding as proposed, it will be yet another blow to a vulnerable population whose lives are being rapidly altered by the budgetary decisions of politicians at all levels of government. 

Hutchison said people who use MHCAN are insured by government-funded Medi-Cal plans, which Gov. Gavin Newsom announced earlier this month would no longer accept undocumented immigrants. MHCAN clients also access groceries through food stamps, and often receive housing through federally funded vouchers — two programs slated to be slashed in President Donald Trump’s spending bill. 

But, perhaps most immediately, losing MHCAN would mean losing a wholly unique thread in the local social safety net, one that is seen as the last outstretched hand for Santa Cruz County’s chronically unstable. 

“Things have been pretty tense here lately,” Hutchison said. 

The last stop

During the week, the MHCAN hive buzzes. 

From 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. on weekdays — except Wednesday — dozens of people, many of whom are recognizable from the local streets, move in and out of the facility, which is set back about 40 yards from Cayuga Street. The scene on a recent Thursday morning had the atmosphere of a clubhouse hang, as if it were an Elks Lodge for Santa Cruz County’s outcasts. 

Outside, a man with a metal slide on his finger expertly navigated an acoustic guitar as a group of people sat around a picnic table. Inside, reggae music played from a cellphone as two staffers cooked a vat of red sauce and tossed a giant bowl of mixed greens salad — all donated by Trader Joe’s and nonprofit Grey Bears. 

In one corner, a cue ball broke open a game of pool as a trio of middle-aged men excitedly moved around a maroon-felted billiards table; in another, a few people sat scattered around a television, some watching a late-1990s film, others simply sleeping or sitting silently with themselves. The laundry machines ran, passersby picked at a modest snack table with slices of bread, apples and bananas. Everyone moved in and out and around the building with a sense of self-determination. It was easy to forget that all of these people were dealing with varying degrees of mental illness. 

As Blair Bareiszis rolled out of the back computer lab where she works, the tire on her wheelchair just missed a German shepherd calmly sprawled across the cool laminate floor. 

“I always feel guilty when I force an animal to move from their spot,” Bareiszis said, in an accent that gave away her East Coast roots, as she unlocked the music room where a few couches, a table, a guitar and a piano sat. 

Bareiszis, a bespectacled blonde in her late 20s whose cerebral palsy has kept her in a wheelchair for much of her life, has been a part of MHCAN for four years. Like all staff members, she began as a client, discovering MHCAN while homeless and trying to escape a relationship. 

The twice-a-day hot meals eventually turned into a part-time morning shift in the computer lab, which she combined with an evening shift at Costco, making for sometimes 12-hour days that would always end with her sleeping in a parking lot. During one difficult five-month stretch, her automatic wheelchair busted, and she was relegated to a manual one, propelled by her own upper-body strength. 

Bareiszis said becoming a member at MHCAN — all clients are granted lifetime “memberships” — marked the first time in her life she had regular access to food, and the first time she began to believe she had a future. At the clubhouse, she could eat breakfast, wash her Costco uniform, shower and go to work. She felt supported, which she said kept her alive during a particularly traumatic stretch in her personal life. 

“MHCAN is sort of the last stop on the road for a lot of people because they’ve fallen through every crack in the system — every single one,” Bareiszis said. 

In some situations, she said, the dynamic between a professional social worker and a vulnerable person can hamper progress: “When I was homeless, sometimes all I wanted was a shower, all I wanted was to be clean and human and talk to people in a safe environment because I was constantly terrified. People that come here know they can find a familiar face and people will listen to them with no judgment and no notepads.” 

But what happens if the last stop closes? Bareiszis acknowledged her “life will be rougher,” but said she worries more about the people who depend on MHCAN for basics like food and a sense of place. 

“Where are these other people going to go? The shut-ins, the hungry people, the ones who are too mentally ill to interact with services without feeling like they are being judged,” Bareiszis said. “People have been coming here for decades feeling like this is the only safe space they have.” 

As MHCAN’s main room came alive for lunch one afternoon, Shelley Bard marched in smiling, her long golden hair lightly sweaty from a birthday run earlier in the day. She sits on MHCAN’s board of directors and volunteers during the week. She has been a member of the clubhouse for about eight years, entering as a client after having experienced homelessness for nearly a decade. Bard said she would wake up in her “tent in the forest,” come to the clubhouse to eat breakfast, shower and wash her work uniform. She would then work a shift at a local restaurant before returning to the tent at night.

Amid the constant fight-or-flight speed of street living, MHCAN not only offered a sense of structure and certainty, but support and understanding that she credits with helping her to see a future and get off the street. She’s stuck around, she said, to offer an example of what’s possible for people suffering from mental illness and homelessness.

“People don’t need to have a police officer in front of them, deciding whether or not they’re a 5150,” Bard said, referring to the police code for someone having a mental health crisis. “Sometimes they just need a human being to talk to. Sometimes they just need to scream and cry.” 

Bard, who gives off a seemingly boundless and optimistic energy, grew solemn as she thought about MHCAN closing after June.

“If this place was to go, you’d have 50 people, per day, without no place to go,” Bard said. “When you have this as the only thing you have and then you don’t have it anymore, I worry about people choosing not to live anymore. It scares me to think what it would be like without MHCAN.” 

A way out

Although people do receive lifetime memberships at MHCAN, they are urged to work toward finding a better living situation. 

“People are welcomed to come for life, but we want people to end up being more functioning and have a full-time job elsewhere,” Executive Director Tyler Starkman said. “There are a lot of people who owe their lives to MHCAN because of the environment that it gives us, and it gives us a reason to want to be productive members of society.” 

Starkman said it’s difficult to measure the success MHCAN has had because “you can’t measure the amount of lives we’ve saved when people have nowhere else to go.” Starkman, who also began as a client but has now led the organization for the past year, said he knows of “at least 20 people” who have pledged to donate their life savings to MHCAN when they die because of the impact it had on their lives. 

On that same afternoon that Bareiszis shared her story, longtime client Richard Walton arrived to tell Bard he had received a housing voucher after years of homelessness. 

Walton, 59, whose family has deep roots in Santa Cruz, said before coming to MHCAN almost a decade ago, his life was a spiral. He had spent nearly three decades in prison and suffered from drug addiction. Walton said his criminal history makes him a “high-risk violent offender.” If he didn’t find MHCAN, he said, he guessed he would have eventually ended up in prison for the rest of his life. 

“I have family here that will help me, and say that everything’s OK, and that they’ve been there, and show me that I don’t have to regress into giving up, into going back to using,” Walton said, seated in the music room. “I got a home today. I’m not strung out today. I’m not a crackhead. I’m not out there trying to scam people or trying to sell them something that’s going to kill them. I’m looking toward having a way better future. Because of here.”

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