Sometimes things happen in life that are pure serendipity, according to Judy Fried.
When the Lincolnshire resident accepted a job as a full-time staff counselor with the Lake County Council on Alcoholism in 1977, she considered it merely a stepping stone on her path to a clinical career as a mental health specialist.
Instead, it became the cornerstone upon which she has built an outstanding administrative career as the executive director of one of Lake County’s premier human service agencies.
Fried, 56, recently celebrated two decades with the Northern Illinois Council on Alcoholism and Substance Abuse, better known as NICASA. She has spent almost 15 of those 20 years as the agency’s top administrator.
Although the agency had existed as the Lake County Council on Alcoholism since 1966, its potential remained largely untapped until Fried assumed the helm after being unanimously voted in by the agency board in February 1982.
“In her first sentence she thanked the board members for their confidence in her,” recalled NICASA Deputy Director Debbie Cassale. “In her second sentence, she recommended that they change the agency’s name (to the Northern Illinois Council on Alcoholism), which they did.”
“We added `and Substance Abuse’ to the name in 1985,” said Fried, who, in explaining her recommendation, said she wanted to dispel a widely held community misconception that the agency was connected to and being funded by the county. In fact, 43 percent of the $3 million annual budget comes from state and federal sources, about 33 percent from client fees and the remainder from private fundraising.
Under Fried’s leadership, NICASA evolved from a modest not-for-profit, community-based agency with a single office in Waukegan into a multi-faceted agency operating five offices around Lake County. Today its mission is to promote healthy lifestyles while preventing and treating substance abuse and alcohol addiction through a myriad of innovative programs and services, most of which are also offered in Spanish.
“For a long time, I think the treatment for addiction was very simplistic in terms of what a person needed to do in order to recover,” Fried said. “The premise was that if you stopped using alcohol and drugs, everything else would fall into place. That’s not true, especially for a disadvantaged population.”
She said that getting addicts to stay clean and sober just isn’t enough; they need skills, resources and positive role models to help ensure their sobriety. “Our philosophy is to treat the whole person, not just the addiction,” she explained.
Among the agency’s 12 programs and 44 services currently being offered, some of the most cutting-edge are Bridge House, a community residence that facilitates independent living among recovering alcoholics and drug addicts; the Women and Children’s Center, an intensive, outpatient day-treatment program designed to help impoverished, drug-addicted women and their children off welfare and back into the work force; Teen Court, an alternative to criminal court in which non-violent, first-time juvenile offenders are sentenced to community service work by a jury of their peers; and the Parent Project, a unique program in which the agency brings parenting classes directly to the work site of major corporations as well as to male and female inmates in the Lake County Jail.
The Parent Project was named one of the nation’s top 15 model family-based delinquency prevention programs in 1996 by the U.S. Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.
“Judy’s a brilliant visionary, an intuitive supervisor and a charismatic leader,” Cassale said. “Most Lake Countians have no idea of the many ways she’s changed their lives through the programs she’s either launched or inspired.”
Such a comment might seem like hyperbole if the subject were anyone else, but Fried’s brand of infectious enthusiasm for her work and genuine compassion for others seem to have impressed everyone from agency staffers and volunteers to community and corporate leaders to the clients themselves.
“When Judy comes over (to the Women and Children’s Center), she renews the staff,” said program director Pam Thompson. “It’s like getting a shot of adrenaline.”
NICASA board chairman James Kemper III, an executive vice president at Kemper National Insurance Co. in Long Grove, credited Fried with changing the agency “from a survival story to a success story.”
That’s because she runs the agency like a small business CEO, according to board president Henry Weishaar, a vice president of human resources at Abbott Laboratories. “A lot of these types of agencies get people who are sensitive (to the needs of others) but can’t make the tough business decisions or motivate people in terms of growth and innovation,” he said. “Judy’s unusual because she’s been able to combine these qualities.”
Given this rare combination, he said Fried could have made a lot of money in the private sector but chose to dedicate herself to helping others instead.
But Fried, who is married to Lincolnshire psychologist Arthur Weinfeld and is the mother of two adult children, had to hone her business savvy. Her lifelong ambition had always been to work as a professional in the mental health field; given her background growing up on the South Side of Chicago, it was a vocation that seemed almost preordained.
Her father, Dr. Joseph Bernsohn, was a neuropsychiatric research scientist who worked for the Veterans Administration. Her mother, Norma, taught early childhood development at Truman and Malcolm X Colleges.
An only child, Fried often found herself in the company of her parents and their friends, where she was exposed to a steady diet of psychological banter that fascinated her. “I was always very aware of it,” she said. “I knew what a schizophrenic was before most kids did.”
Fried, who holds bachelor’s degrees in history and education from Northern Illinois University in DeKalb and a master’s degree in psychology from Governors State University in University Park, taught for a while at several Cabrini-Green schools before securing an internship with Forest Hospital in Des Plaines in 1975. Once the internship had been completed, the hospital offered her a full-time job on its alcohol- and drug-rehabilitation team.
“At that time, substance abuse was not a hot issue but rather an emerging problem,” she recalled.
The position offered Fried a plethora of learning opportunities. She began to help run presentations on the concept of alcoholism as a disease and learned to detoxify patients addicted to various drugs. But as the new hire, Fried was also relegated to working the unpopular evening, weekend and holiday shifts. Because she wanted to spend time with her family, she longed for a day job that would offer her more stability and weekends off.
An acquaintance at the Lake County Health Department suggested she apply for the staff counselor position.
After several years as a counselor, she was promoted to director of community education, which she called the precursor to prevention.
In this capacity, she was responsible for overseeing family interventions with people who had loved ones who were alcoholic or chemically dependent, and she also organized workshops and conferences to heighten community awareness regarding problems such as domestic violence and drunken driving.
“I had always been interested in the areas of family intervention and therapy,” Fried said. “I just always had a knack for it. I got into advocacy by accident and found out I just loved it.”
Because of her visibility within the Lake County community, Fried was selected to serve as a member on the Task Force for Battered Women in 1978. Her commitment to preventing child abuse and providing safe haven for these abused women spurred her into co-founding the Lake County Crisis Center for Domestic Violence, now known as A Safe Place. She later became its first board president.
In addition, Fried has been a vice chair of the Advisory Council to the Illinois Department of Alcoholism and Substance Abuse since 1984 and was named to the Governor’s Forum on Substance Abuse in 1991. She also is a past member of the Executive Director Board of the National Council on Alcoholism and has served on a number of other advisory groups at both the state and national levels.
She suspects it was her leadership role within the community that also prompted NICASA’s board to approach her regarding the executive directorship. Until then, Fried had never considered the administrator’s post for herself. Her background was clinical; she knew little about budgeting, marketing, fundraising and program development. In agreeing to accept the position, Fried negotiated a deal with the agency that allowed her to attend Lesley College in Cambridge, Mass., every other month for two years so she could earn a master’s degree in management for not-for-profit agencies.
Because of her reputation, she has been able to attract an impressive list of Lake County’s most influential community and corporate leaders to serve on the agency’s board of directors.
The list includes State’s Attorney Michael Waller, Associate Judges George Bridges and Christopher Starck, Coroner Barbara Richardson, Round Lake Police Chief Ed Sindles and top-level administrators from corporations such as Abbott, Kemper, Baxter, McDonald’s and Motorola.
“When Judy approached me about serving on the board, there was no hesitancy on my part,” Richardson said. As coroner, she said she has seen the horrible consequences of drug and alcohol use and knows the number of families that are touched by these problems.
“I didn’t know much about the agency, but it didn’t take me long to figure out that this was a board that was going to be going places,” Richardson added.
Waller said that’s because Fried has a talent for attracting other people who share her passion.
But perhaps the accolades that Fried can appreciate most are the ones expressed by those who have benefited from the programs that Fried helped to create.
Lauren M., a 32-year-old Waukegan mother of four, had been struggling with alcoholism for years by the time she arrived at the Women and Children’s Center in North Chicago in 1994. After 18 months at the center, which Fried was instrumental in opening, Lauren earned a high school equivalency diploma, found a part-time job in a nursing home and is studying to be a licensed practical nurse.
“I thank Judy for her dream because, without it, my own dream would have never come true.”
WELFARE REFORM IS OLD NEWS AT NICASA
While some other addiction treatment providers are breaking into sweats over welfare reform, staffers at NICASA’s North Chicago-based Women and Children’s Center are staying cool.
“We’ve been practicing it all along,” said agency director Judy Fried. “The goal here is not just abstinence (from chemical dependency), it’s self-sufficiency.”
Some addiction treatment providers have benefited financially by encouraging clients in their programs to claim disability to receive Social Security benefits, but NICASA refuses to do that.
Opened in 1993 and supported until recently by a three-year, federally funded $1.5 million demonstration grant, the women and children’s program is designed to find a more effective way to treat alcohol- and drug-addicted mothers living in poverty.
In Fried’s opinion, traditional addiction-recovery programs, such as 12-step programs that encourage addicts to practice positive affirmations and surrender their power to a higher authority, have not been very therapeutic for women. She said women who are addicted and oppressed do not have a problem in surrendering their power but rather in taking it back.
NICASA’s program, which was designed by Fried and is considered one of the most successful pilot programs of its kind in the country, promotes empowerment by removing the barriers to recovery. Women are provided not only with treatment for their addiction but also with job-skills training, child care and transportation.
Under the state’s version of the new federal welfare plan known as Temporary Assistance to Needy Families, families must begin working at least 20 hours a week within two years or risk losing benefits. But both Fried and program director Pam Thompson are worried that recipients are being pushed off the welfare rolls too quickly, without being given a real chance to acquire the job training and behavioral skills necessary to become good employees.
In Lake County, Abbott Laboratories and Manpower Temporary Services are partnering with NICASA to help the women find employment. Through this collaboration, women in the program are first trained by Manpower and then placed in temporary positions at Abbott, where they can continue to sharpen their job skills. Three of the women are now permanently employed by the pharmaceutical firm, while others have gone on to full-time positions with other companies.
According to Thompson, most of the women are ordered into the program by the courts through the state Department of Children and Family Services, although some are referred by other treatment centers and a few are self-referrals.
Of the 118 women admitted to the program since its inception, 58 percent have maintained their sobriety. Of those women, 24 are now gainfully employed.
In addition, seven mothers have given birth to drug-free babies, representing a possible $3.5 million savings in health-care costs, based on research by the University of Illinois. According to the researchers, who recently evaluated the program, drug-affected infants can incur $500,000 in long-term care costs. They also determined that the benefits resulting from the reduction in costs to the health care and welfare systems within the first year of recovery outweighed the program costs by three to one.
Nevertheless, when grant monies dried up last September, the center was headed for financial trouble. But area legislators intervened. Largely through the efforts of Rep. Corinne Wood (R-Lake Forest) and Sen. Terry Link (D-Vernon Hills), the center received a one-year grant of $250,000 in state funding to help keep it operating.
“Here’s a program that, with very little subsidy, has helped women to not only get back on their feet but change their lives,” Link said. “Judy’s effort to set this program up was a monumental task. My effort to help keep it going was just a small part.”
