This Black History Month, Case Manager Gina Bijou reflects on what it means to pay it forward in her work with participants in our Brooklyn Supervised Release Program.
By Gina Bijou, Case Manager, Supervised Release Program
If you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else.
– Toni Morrison
My life started off picturesque. Growing up in a two-parent household, learning to read at the age of three, starting kindergarten at 4 years old, graduating high school at 16 with two scholarships to college, and then going on to obtain a Bachelor of Science with a concentration in Business Administration and a minor in Finance.
Upon graduation I became employed at an aeronautical company in Orangeburg, New York. What started out as attending Happy Hour with my colleagues ended up with active drug addiction, homelessness, recidivism, and a mental health diagnosis. I found myself on the opposite side of this desk I work at in Brooklyn and in the very same seat of the participants I now serve today. I was overwhelmed with feelings of hopelessness and the frustration of navigating a system that was set up to help me but confused me to no end, and I found myself going right back to what I had come to know—drugs and institutions.
Today, I feel a sense of obligation and a passion to pay it forward. I self-divulge to my participants so that they have a real-life role model of what it looks like to “make it out” and become a productive member of society. Learning how to live and no longer merely exist.