Holiday Fund: Overcoming adversity, transforming lives

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By Sharon Navarro, grants and development manager at StarVista.

Both of Mark’s parents suffered from serious mental illness: his mother from schizophrenia and his father from bipolar disorder. Between his mother’s frequent hospitalizations and his father’s extreme mood swings, there was a persistent feeling on Mark’s part of depression and loneliness.

So by the age of 16, Mark was doing cocaine, and then moved on to other drugs. “I hid from my parents in a chemical cloud,” he says. “My life consisted of getting high, getting arrested, and repeating it was really miserable. There were times when I just wanted to end it.”

Marilyn grew up with a single mom, who fell into alcoholism and was eventually hospitalized.

“I spent most of my high school career after that couch surfing,” she says. “In my last semester, I had two garbage bags full of my stuff and I had nowhere to go. I was trying to focus on grades but that becomes impossible when you have no place to live. I was angry, I felt abandoned, but I think that anger manifested into determination to succeed.”

Mark entered StarVista’s First Chance program, which provides counseling and a safe alternative to jail.

“I felt hopeless and they gave me a little bit of hope,” he says. “They taught me I wasn’t necessarily a bad person or a failure. They treated me like a human being. I wasn’t running into a lot of nurturing, caring people when I was out there and I did run into that at StarVista.”

Marilyn thankfully found StarVista’s Daybreak transitional housing for homeless youth. “Finding Daybreak meant that I wasn’t alone. It affirmed for me that what was happening to me was not my fault, it wasn’t something I deserved, and there were people in the community that cared about people like me. So, it meant that I mattered, and that even though you’re not privileged, it doesn’t mean you’re not worthy.”

Today, Mark is a certified alcohol and drug counselor, working at StarVista. “My life now is pretty amazing. I’m a guy that came in a methamphetamine addict, somebody that people would look at and say, ‘What use could he possibly be?’ StarVista let me know there was somebody useful underneath that maybe could be salvaged. You can’t have enough people like that in the world, right?”

Marilyn recently completed her master’s degree in public health and she’s a lecturer at San Francisco State University. “Before Daybreak I didn’t feel secure about my abilities to be successful. I knew I could survive but I didn’t think I had a bright future. The counselors encouraged me to think about what I wanted for myself and follow my dreams. But more than that, they empowered me to dream. Because I suddenly believed that I could do more with myself than just survive.”

StarVista offers 23 programs that serve more than 35,000 individuals annually throughout San Mateo County.

Visit [httP://www.star-vista.org www.star-vista.org] or call (650) 591-9623 for more information about StarVista. The address is 610 Elm St., Suite 212, San Carlos CA 94070.