Freedom Pointe’s new location is scheduled to open Monday in the same building as Lifeworks Community Services, 1303 A St.

The center is a place for gathering, enjoying a meal, or playing games. Board games and puzzles are on hand, and pool, foosball and table tennis are also options. Freedom Pointe, now in its third year of operation, aims to help those with mental illness by fostering connections between people.

“It’s to bring the community together,” said Program Coordinator Randy Hoover. “And get a sense of cooperation and celebrating the good aspects of Fort Dodge, is what we’re after.”

The Friendship Center name will live on, Hoover said.

-Messenger photo illustration by Joe Sutter
Marvin Leffingwell, Jr., left, Randy Hoover and Robin Hoover meet in the new Friendship Center space run by Freedom Pointe, located in the Lifeworks building, in this image made from multiple photos. The new space will open for the first time on Monday, and provides a place for those with mental illness to get out, socialize, play games, and receive peer to peer support.

“This is the new Friendship Center. And we’re going to call it that,” Hoover said. “Because we actually ‘owned’ the name before anybody else did.”

At least three of the workers at the new center were once involved in the peer to peer program at the old one. Both Marvin Leffingwell, Jr., and Hoover’s wife, Robin Hoover, worked at the Friendship Center when it was located north of where the Salvation Army is today, and run by Webster County.

“These two have 17 years of experience as peer support. I only have six,” said Randy Hoover, who began working there later after the center moved to the second floor of the building at First Avenue South and Eighth Street Northwest Bank is in now.

Leffingwell explained how the center began.

“They were asking people in the hospital at 3 East, what could keep you out of the hospital?” Leffingwell said. “People were saying we need a place to go, so we’re not isolating or thinking of stuff.”

-Messenger photo by Joe Sutter
Robin Hoover talks about the yarn stored at Freedom Pointe’s new location. Hoover is in charge of crafts that will be done at the center, and also has painting supplies and other goodies in the cupboards shown here.

He speaks from personal experience.

“I was diagnosed when I was 22 years old. I was in and out of the hospital until I applied to be a peer support at the Friendship Center,” he said.

Freedom Pointe was founded 2 1/2 years ago after Randy Hoover retired from the center. Then, Hoover was contacted by the head of the multi-county mental health region which includes Webster.

“Bob Lincoln from the region asked me if I would be willing to come and start a program that is all peer ran. We have no professional leadership; we are just all peer support,” Randy Hoover said. “So I told Bob I’ll give it a try, and we were a 2 1/2 year overnight success.”

Peer counseling provides a different kind of help.

-Messenger photo by Joe Sutter
It used to be a door: Randy Hoover points out the outline where a door has been covered up at the Lifeworks building. Eventually this door will be re-opened, he said, providing a way into the Freedom Pointe location without passing through Lifeworks.

“If you have it, you know what it is,” he said. “You know what they’re going through.”

People with mental illness, he said, “have to hear it from our own kind.”

The Friendship Center was run by Webster County out of the bank building, which is owned by the county, until 2013 when it was moved to the former Wahkonsa School at 330 First Ave. N.

Hope Haven Inc., a nonprofit organization based in Rock Valley, took over administration of the center in December 2013.

The Webster County Board of Supervisors informed Hope Haven in August that they had other plans for the use of the current space, and that the Friendship Center lease would not be renewed after December 31, 2017, said Doug Smit, director of Mental Health and Family Services for Hope Haven, in a press release.

“What has been discovered while looking for a new site is, a similar service was also being provided in Fort Dodge,” Smit said. Hope Haven coordinated with Bob Lincoln, Teresa Naughton of Lifeworks, and Alison Hauser, County Social Services Western Region Manager, and Freedom Pointe to discuss how the Pointe could continue Friendship Center’s peer support services.

“I see this transition as a good thing for the people we are serving and employing in Fort Dodge,” Smit said. “Randy and Marvin were both original employees at the Friendship Center and have started a program that will do a great job providing similar type services to current members of the Friendship Center. Hope Haven, Inc. is proud to have provided these services to people in Fort Dodge over the past four years, and we are sad to leave the many relationships we have formed behind.”

The supervisors have not publicly announced a use for the former space.

“Hope Haven filled a wonderful need for quite a while, and they did a fantastic job,” Randy Hoover said. “I didn’t want to take their place. But we did. Most of what you see in here was actually theirs. They just passed it on to us.

“I thanked them for that.”

The Friendship Center is just one part of the program. Anyone can come out to the center, Randy Hoover said; but one must be diagnosed with a mental illness to take part in the Bridges program, which is one-on-one peer support.

“We advocate for them with doctors, or housing. We do life skills, training with them to help them become more independent,” Randy Hoover said. “The idea being that they live their own lives, rather than what someone is telling them to live.”

“People can come here and they can stay here if they want, but our idea is to get people out into the public,” he added.

Freedom Pointe takes people out bowling on Wednesdays, and makes regular trips to eat out at Taco Tico. They held a “full moon” party in Snell Crawford park on a recent full moon — just as an excuse to get together and have fun.

In the coming year they’ll be sponsoring a softball tournament, a game show night, and more events with prizes, he said.

“We’re going to have bowling tournaments, horseshoe tournaments, just about any tournament you would like to have, we’ll attempt to sponsor,” Randy Hoover said. “We’re also going to do live theater. It is nothing like the Hawkeye Theatre. If we’re good, it’s totally an accident.”

The new Friendship Center will be open Monday 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., and Tuesday through Friday 8 a.m. to 4 p.m.

In the future Randy Hoover hopes to have a separate entrance for the center, apart from Lifeworks, so that the hours can be expanded to 7 a.m. to 10 p.m., seven days a week.

When people do come, he said, “we encourage our staff to ask people here, would you like to go over to McDonalds? Have a pop? We’ll pay for it. Just to get them out into the community and not isolating and hiding in their houses.”

The center is on DART’s No. 1 bus route, he said, and organizers are hoping to put together a program to transport people out there for free.

“A lot of these are people on limited income. For them, it can get expensive to get out here,” Randy Hoover said. “Let’s face it. For some of these people a $2 bottle of pop is more than they can deal with.”

Someday, Randy Hoover would love to have a place downtown again.

“It’s so much more convenient,” he said.

Freedom Pointe’s Bridges program is paid through Community Social Services, the mental health region.

“The rest of it is catch as catch can,” Randy Hoover said. “One thing that is going to happen is that Amerigroup” — that’s one of the managed care companies which manages Medicaid in Iowa — “asked us to do presentations on the importance of peer support. We got grant funding to do that.”

Freedom Pointe’s Friendship Center

Open Monday 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., Tuesday through Friday 8 a.m. to 4 p.m.

Located at Lifeworks Community Services, 1303 A St.

For more information call 408-5917 or 408-5957.