This is a production of WEDU PBS, Tampa, St.

Petersburg, Sarasota.

[music] We've all seen the benefits that growth has brought to Florida and the Tampa Bay area over the years, but growth also creates challenges.

Nearly half the population in the Tampa Bay area are struggling to make ends meet, to find affordable housing, to get behavioral health services, or find a helping hand in times of need.

You're about to meet the CEO of one of the region's largest community service organizations that's working overtime to protect the vulnerable, empower individuals, and strengthen families in need.

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[music] Have you ever heard the words, "Tikkun Olam"?

Most people haven't.

It's Hebrew, and it means repair the world.

It's an ancient rabbinical directive for Jews to strive to make the world a better place.

And it was in the spirit of tikkun olam that Gulf Coast Jewish Family and Community Services Incorporated in the mid 1970s, with three staff members and a budget of about $60,000.

Since then, it's grown to more than 650 staff and a budget of $60 million, serving more than 30,000 people statewide.

Dr.

Sandra Brown is CEO of Gulf Coast Jewish Family and Community Services.

Sandra, welcome to the Suncoast Business Forum.

Thank you.

It's a pleasure to be here.

It's great to have you.

Now in 2015, you were offered an opportunity to compete for the job of CEO at Gulf Coast Jewish Family and Community Services.

At the time, you were the CEO of the YWCA in El Paso, Texas.

Now, in your memoir, you write that as you thought about that offer, the more you thought about it, the more you realize that God must have a sense of humor because one, you're African American, two, you're Christian and you're a Christian female.

And that it must be a joke that they're offering you this job.

But it turns out it was no joke.

No, it was not.

Not a joke.

And what's so ironic about it is I remember praying when I was at the YWCA, which is not religious in the United States.

But I said, God, I'm looking for my next opportunity.

And even though Christian was in the name of the YWCA, this doesn't have to be a Christian organization.

So when I got the call from Gulf Coast Jewish Family and Community Services, it was quite shocking.

And I, I began to wonder, how did they find me?

And how did they find you?

It does seem unlikely, right?

Yes, I was, a search firm reached out.

They had expanded the search to Texas and the gulf states, and it ended there.

And I was in El Paso, which was the border of Mexico and New Mexico.

So I said, wow, 15 miles further to the west.

I wouldn't have even been in the pool of candidates.

Like all successful community service organizations, they typically start small.

In the case of Gulf Coast, it was a tiny organization started in the 50s and 60s little staff, very little budget.

But it has since grown to an enormous organization.

What has driven that that growth over all these years?

And has Tikun Olam been part of that?

Tikkun olam has been key to that growth, and that we recognize it is through that value of of repairing the world that we have been able to outreach to so many people and to serve not just the Jewish community, but well beyond the Jewish community.

So through tikkun olam, we began to provide supportive services for children and foster care and adoption for mental health services, which also began the with the agency start.

We also then expanded to refugee resettlement, which came out of the resettlement of of the Holocaust survivors in the United States, and that was expanded to all people and housing for elders and also workforce development.

So there's been a lot of growth through tikkun olam.

How does Gulf Coast work with other organizations?

It's not everything provided only by Gulf Coast.

You work with many different organizations, right?

Absolutely.

There's no way we could do this alone.

So we partner with many organizations throughout the Tampa Bay region and in South Florida, lead agencies that are providing services on the behalf of the state for adults who are experiencing mental health and others.

But whether it's housing, mental health, child welfare or just referring locally through local municipalities, partnering with the police department and community based organizations, we partner a lot.

The organization has grown substantially.

When you arrive, the budget was somewhere around 30 million.

It's now 60 million.

The budget has doubled in the ten years that you've been there.

What are some of the newer programs that you have implemented and brought to Gulf Coast?

One of our award winning programs is Community Assistance and Life Liaison, where we partner with the St.

Petersburg Police Department, responding to nonviolent 911 calls with social workers.

And we have found that more than 80% of those calls are mental health related.

So that has been an expansion and has led to some other expanded services.

We've also expanded our survivor of torture programs.

We do a lot of nuanced things that many people don't realize, so we're providing mental health support and life skills support to help survivors of torture to regain their footing and to balance.

Behavioral health, mental health.

A big part of what Gulf Coast provides.

This is something that has touched your life personally and your family's life Personally, do you think society understands the extent and the need for mental and behavioral health services?

I have to tell you that I'm so thankful now that more people are speaking about their mental health and welcoming the engagement of clinicians and therapists.

I think that as a nation, we have a long way to go and there is not enough attention to the mental health.

It really needs to be a focus of workforce, of employment, because so many are struggling with mental health and we're seeing it in these recent tragedies.

You know, in the in the media where we're seeing so many mass shootings.

What kind of programs does Gulf Coast have for mental and behavioral health?

So we have, of course, the call program that I mentioned.

And we also have residential treatment centers both in Pasco County and in South Florida, where we are supporting adults who have co-occurring disorders, meaning mental health and drug addiction.

We also are providing support through all of our programs.

They have licensed clinicians that are embedded within those programs to address the varying needs of the families and individuals we're serving.

One of the big areas of support that Gulf Coast provides is for children and family services.

Again, this is something that touched you personally during your formative years.

Tell us about the need and how Gulf Coast is providing that and how it impacted you as a child.

Well, as a child, my mother and father divorced young and she suffered schizophrenia.

So the mental health hits home later in life because of that schizophrenia.

I spent time in foster care and Gulf Coast.

Jfcs has been a key provider in Hillsborough County for foster care, and so we are addressing the needs of families and trying to protect children and reunite them to families wherever possible.

We've also begun a number of youth programs in Hillsborough County, schools in Wimauma, and other areas to help us to help young Latino children who are children of migrant and seasonal farm workers to be strong, healthy and to stay in school.

Tell us about your formative years.

Tell us about where you grew up.

I grew up in St.

Louis, Missouri, a little town called Kinloch, which at one point in time was the largest African American city town west of the Mississippi.

So I grew up with a lot of pride in that community.

I went to school in the Ferguson-Florissant School District.

Ferguson, of course, has become very famous of late, and so I grew up in that area, went to college at the University of Missouri after being emancipated from foster care.

I literally had no place else to go, so I graduated and started college the very next week.

When you were young, your parents divorced.

You were two years old.

When they divorced, your mother raised you.

Your father provided support, but your mother also had schizophrenia.

You had family members around.

What was your family life?

What was the dynamic like?

How did you manage through all that?

That's a great question.

My mother was the youngest child of a large family, and as such, she remained in the home of my grandfather for many years.

But when she was well, she would go off on her own.

So we moved a lot and we always had family.

Whenever my mom had to be hospitalized for her mental illness, I had we had aunts and her brothers and siblings and cousins.

My grandfather.

They all took good care of us and made sure that we had what we needed.

Until she returned home.

What role did other family members at school?

Social service agencies.

What role did they play in helping you keep your life together?

I threw myself into school because we had so many challenges at home as a teen.

I needed the outlet, so I involved myself in everything theater, choir, the foreign festival, learning languages, getting involved in sports.

I threw myself into everything, and my high school counselor really became a surrogate parent for me during my years of foster care.

She provided great support.

She bought me my high school graduation gown and my outfits to wear for high school graduation.

Situation.

So the school really became a source of strength.

And I think schools today can be a source of strength for children who are struggling at home.

When you were growing up, when you were young, you and your siblings had to move around a lot.

Your mother had mental health issues.

You spent time with family.

You also spent time with friends, and in your mid-teens, you spent time in foster care.

Tell us about that.

Foster care is not all it's cracked up to be.

There was a very caring family that took me in, and they had sufficient resources to support me, but it was a challenge in many ways.

And basically, when I turned 17, it was time to go.

And so I left really with still about seven months of high school left.

So I really had no place to go after foster care.

So I found myself couch surfing wherever I could stay until a friend's parent told her to bring me home, and that family nurtured me for the last 4 or 5 months until I graduated high school, and they drove me to college.

And we maintain a relationship today.

Having lived through foster care, how has that informed the programs that you've developed at Gulf Coast?

>> I think children today in foster care, while it was a struggle back then when I was in foster care, the things that we see today, there's so much more exposure to things that are dangerous.

Children have access 24 over seven.

There's trafficking people who don't mean youth.

Well, and it's it's harder to keep children today in foster care because they run.

If they're not happy, they're hard to find.

And so we work very hard to try to build a wall of protection around these children to help them feel safe.

But but there are many challenges, so I understand children and foster care.

I also understand the challenges are more significant today, and it really takes many more arms around youth to to move them forward and to get them to be strong young people.

After you got a degree, a bachelor's degree in biology, you started working on your MBA, but then you moved to Indiana and started working in academia for a community college.

Tell us about that.

So that I spent my time in undergrad at the University of Missouri, volunteering in the student admissions and volunteer, uh, relations office.

So I was helping students to enroll in college and going to Indiana.

It was a natural fit for me to begin working at a two year college in admissions.

So that's how I began the first 17 years of my career, which was in higher education.

So from Indiana, you then went to the University of Texas in El Paso?

Yes.

And you began working also in academia, in a different area, but also in recruiting, am I right?

Yes, I discovered a talent for grant writing that I never dreamt I would have, and began to write grants for low income, first generation youth to attend college, to matriculate, to help migrant and seasonal farm workers get their geds and go to college.

And it really became core to my value of of giving others a hand up where I had been given so much.

It was in El Paso that you met Eric Brahm, who then became your husband, and you have three children together.

Tell us about your family.

So Eric was a soldier at the time.

He was active duty in the army, and we met and it was a very quick romance.

We were married ten months later.

He was a single father of a two year old son who I adopted.

And so my son, who is now in his 30s, and then we have our two daughters, I have two grandchildren.

And Eric and I will celebrate our 30th anniversary this year.

In 2000, you went back to school.

You were working at the University of Texas, El Paso, but you also went back to graduate school?

Yes, tell us about that.

I had spent so many years in higher education by then.

I figured if I'm going to be in higher education, I really should get a doctorate degree so that I can ensure continued growth in the field.

So I went back to school and received my master's and doctorate in education while I was working and raising children.

It was a lot to balance, but I think because I always threw myself into things, I was able to manage all of those things at the same time.

When I started, I believe we had a staff of five, including myself, and then outreach programs grew not just in those initial programs, but with college retention initiatives, with the National Youth Sports Program and summer food service program.

And eventually I was overseeing about 60 staff, and then I was promoted to associate vice provost for undergraduate studies, where I oversaw all of the entering student programs admissions, financial aid, orientation and testing, and basically helped students to enroll in the university.

So as University of Texas, El Paso, you really began to discover your management skills, your people management skills, and also managing multiple complex organizations simultaneously.

Absolutely, yes.

I believe that's where the complexity came, because not only were you having to write grants and mentor others to become great grant writers, the difference between working with migrant and seasonal farm workers and youth and sports and food services were all very different.

In May of 2005, you became the CEO of the YWCA in El Paso, Texas, one of the largest YWCA in the nation budget of about $30 million.

And it was a revered organization, and it was a great opportunity, but it was a lot more challenging than you anticipated.

I served on that board for seven years when the CEO retired.

We hired another CEO who then resigned after three years.

And I thought I knew everything on that board.

And it's not really until you're inside an organization that you have the Your opportunity to peel those layers off and see.

But there were deferred maintenance issues with purchasing lots of opportunity to to make a difference and to strengthen the organization and to build capacity and infrastructure through technology.

And you were at the YWCA for how many years?

Ten.

Right now it's, it's like fixing an airplane while you're flying.

Yes.

Because when you have an organization that is as respected and revered as the YWCA, but you discover when you look under the hood, it's not running as well as everybody thought.

You have to be pretty discreet.

Absolutely.

That is very, very much so, because you want to honor the legacy of those who came before you.

You you have a duty and a responsibility to raise funds to keep the organization going.

And so it's a balancing act that you're fixing things while you're also doing all those other things that you need to do while keeping a low enough profile to where the media is not.

Tell us about your first year right now.

What are you doing?

You're just not looking for attention.

You really want to stabilize that organization.

In November 2015, Gulf Coast Jewish Family and Community Services contacted you.

You were still at the YWCA, contacted you about an opportunity to be CEO of Gulf Coast Jewish and Jewish Family and Community Services.

And initially, as you said, you thought it was a joke.

Why would they pick an African-American Christian female to run a Jewish organization?

But you realize was no joke.

And it was really because your ability to manage complex organizations that this could be a good fit.

Am I right?

Absolutely.

And when I looked at the opportunity, I really began to study the organization, and I saw some of the tragedy in its recent history at that time with the the death of CEOs back to back, which was very heart wrenching.

But I knew when I saw that they were supporting Holocaust survivors and refugees and children in foster care, and adults with behavioral health and mental health issues, there was this was a real opportunity to make a difference.

You joined Gulf Coast in 2016.

Your husband, Eric, also got a great job in the in the Tampa Bay area.

How has Gulf Coast changed, in your opinion, from its founding, but during the period you've arrived?

And to what extent is it still providing services for the Jewish community, which is its founding?

Yes, it's it's we're still providing services for the Jewish community.

But I think what's interesting that people fail to realize is there's so much more funds available when you're supporting, let's say, elders.

So I have limited resources for Jewish elders.

But when I write a grant for elders, all of my Jewish elders are also beneficiaries of that.

And so there's very little that that's exclusive to any group unless it's Jewish Family Services.

And we're able to bring forth many more resources because of our ability to serve others through tikkun olam.

So you've discovered that by broadening the base, you get leverage to serve those who originally were intended to be served in the first place.

Absolutely.

If we write a grant for transportation, our Holocaust survivors or elders, they're absolutely going to benefit from that.

But I can't write a grant for transportation just for, you know, Jewish elders.

So it really is a it's a wonderful thing that has helped us to expand our mission while being very keen and focused on our purpose and why we were founded.

it.

What challenges and opportunities do you see facing our community?

The community you serve, and are the resources adequate to meet those challenges?

I hate to sound like a broken record, but there is a resource challenge.

There's a human resource challenge.

There are financial resource challenges, and there are technology challenges.

With everything in the cloud and the cost going up there.

And there's a mental health challenge.

I think our staff and nonprofit organizations are having to become accustomed to saying no because the resources, whether it's federal, state, local, they're dwindling.

And that is creating a behavioral health crisis.

I believe that's going to, unfortunately, grow that we're going to need to pay attention to.

In addition to leading one of the largest nonprofit community service organizations in the greater Tampa Bay area in the state of Florida, you've also taken on leadership roles with other important organizations like the Chamber of Commerce.

You've served as chair of the Chamber of Commerce, and you've led other economic development organizations.

Why is that important to you, and how do you think those things have helped develop your leadership skills?

You can't, as a leader of a nonprofit, expect leaders to serve in volunteer roles on your board.

If you're not willing to also show yourself as a leader in the community.

And so serving on the Chamber of Commerce boards, leading those organizations, being active with charities like Copperheads and these others, that helps to introduce the organization also to the community.

Otherwise, people don't really necessarily know what Gulf Coast Jewish Family and Community Services does, and they make the assumption that you have to be Jewish to receive support.

And so it's been a way for me to bring our message to the people and at the same time to attract leaders to support our work.

You've written a memoir, an Angel for Detroit.

In it, you talk about the whole trajectory of your life the family with divorce, mother with schizophrenia, multiple homes, foster care challenges that in most cases would have derailed most young people.

But you defied the odds.

What is it about you that gave you the strength, the fortitude, the vision to be as successful as you've become today?

I believe my faith has been a big a big contributor to my fortitude.

Just this knowing that there's more out there that every day is worth getting up because you have a purpose and and wanting to live a purposeful life.

And the surprises of what comes each day that certainly has helped.

And also just knowing that people need help and so many people helped me.

Sandra, I'd like to thank you so much for being our guest today.

Thank you.

It's been a pleasure.

Thank you.

If you'd like to see this program again or any of the CEO profiles in our Suncoast Business Forum archive, you can find them on the web at wedu.org/sbf.

Thanks for joining us for the Suncoast Business Forum.