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Naturally, as people worked, they became hungry. The need for someone to make lunch arose. As the program developed, the work evolved. The need to answer the phone and organize paperwork became self-evident. All these tasks were opportunities that gave these men and women meaning and purpose to their day.
By asking members to join with staff to accomplish the work of building and running a clubhouse, John Beard had created a new dynamic in the treatment of psychiatric illness. Members helped themselves by helping the clubhouse; in working relationships they experienced themselves as valued contributors who were wanted, needed and appreciated by their community.
And so Fountain House, the first Clubhouse was born.
Fountain House spawned a radical new movement in the treatment of psychiatric patients, one that recognized that people with mental illness could benefit from productivity, community, and mutually reciprocal relationships with staff.
Unlike the medical model, in which the role of the "professional" was to diagnose and repair the "patient", the Clubhouse approach created an intentional community in which the staff constantly needed to seek out members' strengths and talents to run the Clubhouse successfully.
In 1977, the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) awarded Fountain House a multiyear grant to establish a national training program on the Clubhouse Model. By the time the NIMH funding came to an end in 1987, there were 220 Clubhouses in the United States, and Clubhouses had been started in Pakistan, Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Holland, South Africa and Canada.
As a result of the training program's phenomenal success, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Public Welfare Foundation and the Pew Charitable Trust awarded Fountain House funding to launch the National Clubhouse Expansion Project.
Until this time, the Clubhouse philosophy had been passed down in an oral tradition. With a wave of new Clubhouses appearing virtually all over the world, the need for a unifying document in the form of a Clubhouse 'code of ethics' became clear.
In 1989, at the Fifth International Seminar on the Clubhouse Model in St. Louis, a draft document codifying the Clubhouse Standards was proposed and debated. Agreement about the proposed 35 standards was virtually universal, and the International Standards for Clubhouse Programs were finalized at the end of 1989.
There are now 36 International Standards for Clubhouse Programs that define the Clubhouse Model of rehabilitation, and serve as a "bill of rights" for members and a code of ethics for staff, board and administrators.
At the heart of the Clubhouse community's success, the Standards provide the basis for assessing Clubhouse quality through the International Center for Clubhouse Development (ICCD) certification process. These standards are reviewed and, if necessary, amended every two years by the worldwide Clubhouse community.
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