The Mantle and Project Place
In 1974, I was at a weekend retreat at the Project Place Farm. I was lying in the main room in my sleeping bag along with five or ten others. The old farm had many bedrooms and there were approximately forty people at the weekend at the farm in New Hampshire.
Project Place was an outgrowth of the desire of some to see help given to street people in the late sixties and early seventies. It was known as an alternative mental health agency. People could sleep there overnight and free counseling was available. Most of the funding, if not all of it, came from the National Institute of Mental Health and grant requests from several state agencies. We were all paid the same: $100. per week per person, no matter what job you did, with a floating scale for dependents. We were all dropouts of one sort or another. I had left Mobil Oil Corporation to go back and further my education and most of the others had desires to help others and were frustrated with the formal, state run institutions that were designed to do that.
As I was lying on the floor in my sleeping bag, I suddenly could see a mantle over a fireplace with candle sticks on it. It was brilliant and beautiful. It was real! With my eyes closed, I could turn my head and the mantle remained stationary. I tried to see if there was anything else around but all I could see was the mantle.
Someone was shaking me. It was Paul. He said the room he was sleeping in was on fire.
Project Place, for me, was an organization where my graduate training could be practiced with no questions asked. I was considered quite unique: a drop-out from business and industry. Most of the others that were there were younger and part of, what was then termed, the counter-culture scene. The one thing we had in common was a desire to provide mental health services to a part of the community that could not be serviced by any other agency. These were the homeless, drug addicts and generally destitute people of Boston. I became very close to some of the people that I worked with at Project Place. With others the relationship we had was purely professional, if there was such a thing. In the group that I worked with I was considered fairly, if not totally, bourgeois. I was the only one of the team that was still married and intended to stay that way and was supporting my family. Some tolerated my life-style while others saw me as a threat to theirs. I was considered the token “square” but considered useful in dealing with clients and organizations with my background.
The sexual preferences of the members of the group were wide and varied. This was beneficial for the mission of the group in terms of being able to service a wide range of people in the community that were generally rejected by other agencies. Our principal function was to teach self-help groups and mental health agencies the skills and techniques of crisis counseling. This was at the time when drug hotlines and crisis hotlines were beginning, along with suicide hotlines and drop-in centers.
The group had several grants for particular projects, one of which was teaching a group in Columbia Point about alcoholism and counseling techniques. This was during the time of the Columbia Point riots, and the two of us that were working there were given a protective escort into the housing project and to the meeting place.
We also had several contracts with church groups and church agencies that wanted to establish either crisis counseling centers or crisis phone hotlines in their churches.
Brian Warner. Johanna’s Eleven (Kindle Locations 184-217).