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Shamicka was the first born child in her family, and as is usual for the oldest, she didn’t get to be little very long. “I didn’t have the best childhood. It wasn’t a fairytale or even standard of what you would want it to be. I grew up faster than I had to. I was the oldest child of 4 at the time, so I took that lead. I’ve always been mature and not easily influenced. I knew what I wanted life to be like.”
Faith that it’s going to work out
In school and in life Shamicka always tried to walk the high road. “I wasn’t the best ‘A’ student, but I was always a good student, and I always did the right thing.” Her self-driven determination surprised even her own mother, who still remarks in disbelief, “Oh my God. You were such a good teenager.” Shamicka’s grandmother was a North Star in her childhood. “My grandmother was a minister, so she taught me about God and faith and prayer, and that belief gave me an outlet when everything was not great.” Today Shamicka still calls on these tools when things feel rough.
“Even when nothing feels right, I have faith that it’s going to work out. My faith keeps me from getting stuck in a bad space.”
Shamicka also realizes how much her teachers at Edison Tech influenced her path. “I didn’t know it at the time, but they impacted my decisions and they still low-key impact me today. That’s why I fell in love with Hillside Work-Scholarship Connection as a youth advocate. I felt like I was doing what those teachers had been doing for me. I was that extra adult in someone else’s life.”
At Hillside, Shamicka was able to plug in. “It was natural. I worked in the city with students that went to The City School District, and with students who went to the Greece Central School District. It was very normal to me. I could connect with the children because I remembered that person in me, or I had seen that person before in a friend. I was able to dive into that and be very present. It was simple.”
When Shamicka accepted a position at East House to mentor and support people on their mental health journey, her breakthrough moment came later. “One of the questions they asked me when interviewing for the position was how I related to mental health and illness. I didn’t think that I really could relate.” It was all around Shamicka’s world, but at first she didn’t see it for what it was, or how it impacted her. “One of my close cousins struggled with mental illness. We all knew that he struggled from time to time, but it wasn’t a full-blown crisis. It was, ‘Oh he’s acting up again. Alright, someone go help him.’” Usually her family could get to him in time, until the one time they couldn’t.
“In that moment, he was killed by the police. It was a tragedy and it was in the news. My thought was, ‘What if he received the help that he needed? What if he was really getting the services that could help him?’ His outcome would have been so different.”
Shamicka sees many people who struggle with mental challenges, but fly under the radar and are afraid to get help. “The spectrum of mental illness is so wide that you would never know. We have clients that live in communities right next door to anyone, clients who flourish, who have families, who are parents raising their children, or who are in school and working.” Once she started seeing its proliferation, she couldn’t unsee it. “East House made that connection for me and opened the door to that world. They helped me realize how close I am to mental wellness. I understand how much it really does mean to me. It is personal.”
You don’t get to a finish line with mental health where it’s over. You can manage it, and work at it, but it doesn’t disappear. “With mental illness, it is never ending. Someone can always go into crisis at any moment. Even though you work professionally during the nine to five hours, it’s just not a nine to five job. You’re talking about people, and life happens after hours.” One nominee admires how collected Shamicka is when dealing with patients in crisis.
“People may forget your name, but they will never forget how you made them feel. The work Shamicka does is not easy. It can take nerves of steel to help clients recoup from a crisis in real time.”
Working at East House has changed her definition of success. “Yes, you have some people who are not doing well at all, who are in the hospital regularly, but you have some people who are doing great and living healthy productive lives all around us in the community. Being able to impact those outcomes is rewarding to me.
How I defined rewarding work when I was working with youth was different. You didn’t see it right away, but you knew what you poured into the youth would come back 10 fold, and I did see that. I’m getting older so a lot of the youth I worked with are now adults and are parents and run their own businesses and graduated college, or in the workforce, and we are still connected. That rewarding part looks different with mental health. It can be more immediate.
When you’re working with mental health, success for some clients can be taking a shower that day, and that’s amazing. ” After years at both Hillside and East House, Shamicka has been able to identify where the gaps and synergies are in these organizations. She has reimagined a more powerful way to address human services that works out of a single community-centered source.
“There really is something needed right in the middle to blend these organizations. There’s value in something that can tie services together and provide an entire spectrum of community support.” Shamicka envisions a central organization that could work as a catch-all operating under one roof.
“Once you get the people in, you would be able to identify their needs and offer different services. You would have people from different professional backgrounds that do the footwork, mentors, life coaches, psychiatrists, psychologists, and social workers. You have to have the whole gamut because it’s all needed. There are so many different collaborations that have to happen for individuals. Having someone that you feel comfortable meeting with regularly is important. It might not look like you go into a building and sit on a couch, but maybe someone would feel more comfortable coming to a therapeutic session at a coffee shop.”
“It’s about removing the stigma and changing the definition of what health looks like.”
The amazing thing about Shamicka is that she is able to identify each person’s comfort level and meet them where they’re at. One nominee points to Shamicka’s super power as “supporting others and nurturing the light within all people.” However, they way our systems are set up, many people fall through the cracks.
“Right now, a youth could be struggling and need mental health support, and people may not recognize the behavior for what it is. They might also be the child of a parent who is struggling with mental health support, but no one is recognizing it, and so the opportunity for support is completely missed. If you’re serving youth and it is recognized that something is going on just from the story they are sharing about what’s happening at home, you should be able to act and offer services and resources directly and immediately to the family.”
If you are at a facility that does not offer services or resources for the issues parents may be going through, then intervening when you see red flags can be ineffective if you have nothing to offer but referrals to other places. It can also be a deterrent to have to recount traumatic situations over and over. “To say ‘We can offer these services right here, just through our program, and you don’t have to tell your story to another person,’ this would remove a barrier.” There is of course also the obstacle of insurance that treat healthcare as a billable privilege instead of a universal human right. “In a perfect world everyone could afford health care, they would not think twice about going to the doctor because they wouldn’t have to make a choice between their wellness and the electric bill.”
Human services can be as draining as it can be rewarding for empathic people. Some people take harbor in Shamicka’s energy. One nominee says, “In a world of chaos, Shamicka is the calm, the hope, the sprinkle of optimism that everything will be ok.” Shamicka is able to maintain this energy by setting boundaries around her time.
“I do maintain a life of balance. I love working for people, so I pour 100% into it. I also love my family. I told myself I cannot pour everything into this and not pour into my husband and my children and my siblings. I still want to be everything for everyone, and every day you just can’t do that.”
While you won’t catch Shamicka saying “No” outright, she will say, “Not today” or “This is not the time.” I try to be mindful and allow myself moments where I cannot and let that be ok. I allow myself a mental health day to not go into work, or work a half day. I allow myself the ability to tell my family, ‘I’m not cooking today. We’re going to order out.’ I give myself that moment to say ‘I’m going into my mommy cave and I’ll see you guys in an hour.’ Trying to be everything all the time will get you burned out.”
When you ask Shamicka about something in her life that is just for her, that she loves just for the sake of loving it, she will tell you ‘travel.’ “If someone presents an opportunity to go somewhere, I’m going to make it happen. I allow myself this moment where I can check out, but I do recognize once you check back in, everything else is still happening. I give myself that breathing moment still. I tell my husband all the time ‘We still have to live.’ We have to enjoy life because if you just work work work work work, it’s going to pass you by. I can’t believe my husband and I are 40.”
“Life is going to continue to happen, days are going to continue to come, and if you don’t take the moment to smell the roses, you are going to regret it.”
Shamicka has been thinking about the future lately and about revisiting a passion project she started when her daughter was seven. “There was a period of time when my daughter struggled with knowing her beauty. She went to school in Greece in classrooms with predominantly white students. She loved modeling clothes, so I started to put her in little shows, not pageantry, just little modeling shows and she began to flourish. I decided I wanted to do something centered around that. I created a program called Renee’s Journie.
It was a youth modeling program with etiquette classes, public speaking, and modeling training to prepare for shows and headshots. It was designed to help build confidence and self esteem in young girls who struggled the way my daughter did. I’d love to get back into that, but I promise you every time I started back into it, I ended up pregnant,” says Shamicka laughing. “Through some medical advances, that will not happen again,” she says. “It may be something I venture back into.”
Shamicka is also looking to join different community boards to magnify her impact. “Higher levels of leadership interest me. I went through the African American Leadership Development Program with United Way and I aspire to go through Leadership Rochester next, but it’s costly. I know I can have an impact working one on one with people, however I know that I can do even more if I’m sitting at a table weighing in on the decisions where the dollars go and how they are spent.”
She believes funding needs to be used to empower people and that investing correctly in communities can have a much larger ripple than what the monetary value of something can actually buy. She feels positive about the future of mental health for the Black community. “It’s been my experience that we (Black folks) don’t go to psychologists or psychiatrists. We kind of lean on our faith a little more. Right now we are in a time and a space where mental health is so out in the open and in the news. Everyone sees it. People are realizing that it’s normal, that it’s ok to seek help. Things are happening now.”
Learn more about East House and donate to support their mental health programs at easthouse.org.
Learn more about Black Women ROC! here and register to attend the virtual panel discussion with the 2021 nominees here.
mailing address P.O. BOX 10011, Rochester, NY 14610 • info540westmain@gmail.com
One Response
This was a wonderful article about my former colleague, Shamicka! So glad to see this! Thank you!