5 Questions for Karen Barker, Account Manager

5 Questions is our ongoing feature where we introduce you to the people who make Brandywine Counseling run, spotlighting a different staff member every two weeks.

Name: Karen Barker
Job: Account Manager, Lancaster Center
Time with BCI: 13 years

1. What is your job at BCI and what do you enjoy about it?
The job that I do is like information central. I take the money from the clients, but also, I try to keep everybody informed of what’s going on, including clients, staff, anybody that needs anything. [When a client comes to the window,] first they have to pay. Then they may need to see their counselor, so I page the counselors. They may have a doctor’s appointment, or they have lab work, or they need to go up front for some other reason. I try to just be in a million different directions, while standing in one spot.

As nasty and argumentative as it is, it’s still one of the most enjoyable things in my life.

2. What advice do you have for someone who would like to do the job you do?
Be patient, and understand that every person that steps up to your window is not the same person who was there thirty seconds before, and everybody deserves to be treated on their own basis, not in the space of someone else.

3. You give out a “thought of the day” to the clients on slips of paper. How did you get that idea and where do the thoughts come from?
I’ve done that for the past 15 years. I got the idea because one of my very favorite clients, when he first came on, said, “Miss Karen, I need to be told what to do every day.” And I just laughed at him, and so that actually became the first daily reading the next day. The very first reading said, “Sometimes I need direction, though I don’t like being told what to do.”

From that point on, I tried to do one every day, and they get very upset if there’s not one every day! “Yo, Miss Karen! Where’s my reading?” And the readings come from either my mind -- I think of something in the middle of the day, write it on a slip of paper, tape it on the wall – or someone says something to me that I know they need to hear again, come back at them, and I’ll just make that one of the readings.

4. What has been the most rewarding moment for you at BCI?
One specific client, and him finding the sobriety that he looked for, is always something that I carry around. When it gets tough and you think no one can do it, I just think back to that first person whose urine was clean.

He came directly from the hospital, and he was in the kind of state that, both mentally and physically, he was a beaten man. But he knew that it was up to him to pull himself up on his feet -- we’d stand behind him if he fell backwards -- but he had to pull himself up. And when I saw the kind of strength from how far down he was, I knew that, just being there for when they get straight, but also when they fall -- because he fell many times -- but every time he came up, he was ready to do it again, wholeheartedly. And it’s very emotional to watch, you get very attached.

5. If you had $30,000 to donate to BCI, what would you do with it?
I would start out with $10,000 straight off to the Bridge Perinatal division. I would take another $20,000 to start an outreach that is equal to the methadone piece, because I find that when people first come on the clinic, that’s the hardest time. They’ve already hit bottom. They are so done that their own mother is done with them. They have no one to borrow 4 dollars from, they have nowhere to find 4 dollars. But the clients willingly help the clients. And so I would start that to be available for clients during their first 30 days of treatment, and make it easier for them to stay in treatment.