HELPING OTHERS

MENTAL HEALTH

Live Oak Community gives TXST students hands-on experience

Cognitive disabilities such as traumatic brain injuries, intellectual developmental disabilities, autism and other mental illnesses can be isolating. Socialization is important in order to increase cognitive functioning and overall well being. That is something that Live Oak Living Community utilizes regularly to positively impact the lives of its residents, and they employ Texas State student interns that create various social clubs and interact regularly with those living in the community. This approach has positive benefits that are twofold as it also gives the students invaluable experience in the field and many are hired on as permanent staff when their internship concludes. Live Oak held its 10th annual graduation ceremony for those interns on April 30.

'The people that we work with, tend to be at a point in life where they've had a lot of difficulty being able to be an active member of the community, and that could be because of multiple hospitalizations due to mental illness. It could be because of a brain injury, but usually, they don't have friends. They don't have things to do. They can isolate [and] become depressed,” said Rachel Medina, LiveOak Living Community executive director. “By providing a supportive community like Live Oak, we're able to break the cycle of recurring hospitalizations or recurring incidents that people might be having and provide a space where they can have meaningful interactions with other people who understand them.”

Angie Carballo, LiveOak Living Community director of development, said the Live Oak Community has three separate living quarters. Live Oak Ranch is on 63 acres in Martindale. The Smith House Community is a home in a neighborhood that houses seven residents. There is also the Live Oak Apartments, which is a five unit apartment building within walking distance from the square.

“We focus on helping people achieve the things that they want,” Carballo said. “[If] somebody comes here and they say, ‘I'd really like to volunteer at the animal shelter,’ we'll do what we can to make that happen. Or if they want to get a job, we're going to work on interview skills [and] work with the Texas Workforce Commission.”

Medina graduated from Texas State University in 2013 with a degree in psychology. She had no hands-on experience, which made it difficult to make decisions on grad school and the direction she wanted to take with her career. When she came on board at Live Oak, she wanted to create something that could help people in a similar situation.

“I got really involved in trying to create a better internship program for people like me, who have a genuine interest and love for mental health but need to have the experience in order to make a good decision about and a practical decision about their future career,” Medina said. “Our hopes in creating this internship was that it would help students who were in the same boat as me — who had a passion but had no practical application — [and give them] an opportunity to see what it could be like to work in the field of mental health care and get some experience in working with people who have a traumatic brain injury or mental illness or who are on the autism spectrum.”

Medina said the Live Oak Community is a “unicorn” in the mental health care field.

“Our interns are able to come in and get hands-on experience, but we treat it as an interview. So we have students coming in anywhere from 120 to 500 hours with us, and we're able to see how they interact with staff and residents and how they fit in the culture. We're able to get feedback from the residents themselves on who they like working with, which provides a unique experience for them because they get to pick who's going to be working in their home. And you don't get that in long term care. We've also seen such a wonderful influx is the amount of creativity that we have in our programming thanks to the internship process.”

At the Graduation ceremony, each of the interns told about their experiences working at Live Oak. Patrice Taylor was a bit nervous when first starting the internship but said that waned after creating some collages with one of the residents and receiving an aura reading from another.

“That was my first time working in an assisted living [home] for disabled adults. I had no idea what to expect,” Taylor said. “It gave me the opportunity to observe firsthand the challenges, opportunities and intricacies of providing respite care, which deepened my understanding and fueled my passion for pursuing a career in this field.”

Grace Garrison-Tate won the Ollie Seay Award for Excellence, which was created after the late advocate for people with intellectual disabilities who passed away in 2023. Garrison-Tate said working at Live Oak confirmed that working with kids with disabilities was the right path.

“I went to an Art Museum on a random Wednesday, and didn't even know about it. And that was actually one of my favorite days. One of the residents, we asked him if he had a good time. And he said, ‘I love the souvenir shop, but everything else is confusing,’” Garrison- Tate said, which received a resounding laugh from the audience. “One of the residents that I got really close with made me earrings, and it just made me feel so known and loved. And there's just so much love at Live Oak.”

Tahini Engelhardt completed her internship at the Live Oak Ranch location.

“I spent my morning with one of the residents, Scott. I told him how nervous I was to speak tonight. So he said, ‘just write it all down, so you don't make a fool of yourself,’” Engelhardt said, adding that the time at Live Oak taught her how to adapt. “When choosing my internships, I planned on working with kids with disabilities and ended up working with adults diagnosed with traumatic brain injuries and schizophrenia. I was intimidated at first because I'm the type of person who really plans ahead, but I quickly fell in love with everything about Live Oak. This internship has allowed me to gain so much knowledge on various mental and physical disabilities and, ultimately, grow as a person.”

Learn more about Live Oak at this linkliveoakliving. com.