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A year ago, the future was looking bright for Vail Communities, a 45-year-old Twin Cities-based nonprofit that provides services and support for people with mental illness. The centerpiece of Vail’s programming is its clubhouses — member-run meeting spaces where people with serious and persistent mental illness gather for community, food, support and advocacy.
In June 2024, encouraged by growing interest in and support of their programs, Vail opened a third clubhouse in St. Paul’s Rondo neighborhood, adding an east metro option to its long-operating programs in Hopkins and Minneapolis.
State support of the clubhouse model of mental health support felt secure, said Chad Bolstrom, Vail Communities senior director of clubhouse programs and public policy, and the organization was seeing growing membership. There was even talk of expanding clubhouse programming to Greater Minnesota.
“Last year we served a little over 770 members,” Bolstrom said. “In the St. Paul clubhouse, we signed up over 120 active members in a relatively short period of time. We’ve gotten people engaged in a community that is brand new.”
Then, as it seemed like the sun was shining on Vail, rain clouds gathered. On April 10, the organization announced in a press release that the Minneapolis and St. Paul clubhouses would be defunded and closed, due to federal cuts. The Hopkins clubhouse, Vail’s original location, would remain open, Vail leaders said, because its Hennepin County funding remained secure.
When her organization was informed of the cuts, Karina Forrest Perkins, Vail Communities president and executive officer, marshaled a group of community supporters for a meeting with Minnesota Department of Human Services (DHS) leadership, including Assistant Commissioner Teresa Steinmetz.
The April 11 meeting, Perkins said, “went as well as it could.” While Steinmetz did not offer a clear replacement for the rescinded federal funding, Perkins said she was “sincere in saying, ‘We want to fund this. We are not sure how.’” Steinmetz, Perkins said, told those gathered at the meeting that guaranteed funding for the Minneapolis and St. Paul clubhouses would last until their contract ran out on June 30, and the programs could stay open until then.
“I think she’s in a difficult position,” Perkins said of Steinmetz. “She told me Friday that they have every intention of working with us to find funding for continuation.”
In a statement provided to MinnPost, Steinmetz confirmed that her department continues to investigate other options for keeping the clubhouses open.
“DHS is working with Vail Communities to explore the possibility of ongoing funding,” Steinmetz’s statement said. “To be clear,” she continued, “DHS is not cutting Vail Communities funding. Their current contract expires June 30, 2025 and there is not a dedicated funding stream past that.”
Perkins’ takeaway from the meeting was that Steinmetz and her colleagues saw the clear benefit of the clubhouse model in supporting the recovery of people with mental illness, and they wanted to find a way to continue to support Vail Communities. Verbal reassurance is nice, she said, but it isn’t the same as a continued funding guarantee: “I am still not sure what they’re willing to do. I do not have a contract in my hand.”
The potential cuts have been hard on the mental health of clubhouse members, Bolstrom said.
“Some folks are experiencing increasing anxiety symptoms. Some think it is the end times. People are talking about the Rapture,” she said. “I see members withdrawing, concerned that they are not as safe in the larger community.” While scrambling to secure funding sources, Bolstrom said that he and his colleagues are “doing our best to keep members connected and to try to allay their fears.”
Bolstrom said the news that funding for the Minneapolis and St. Paul clubhouses would continue through June gave him and his Vail Communities colleagues a moment to catch their breath before continuing their fight for the survival of the clubhouses.
“I think ‘reprieve’ is a decent description,” Bolstrom said of this moment in time. He explained that Steinmetz and other leaders at DHS have since said, “‘We’ll do our best.’” With strained federal and state finances hanging over their heads, he continued, state leaders are “not certain what they’ll be able to do, but they’ve given us their written and verbal commitment to finding a solution to sustain our funding as best they can.”
On April 23, Perkins and Bolstrom had a meeting with Diane Neal, DHS deputy director of the mental health-behavioral health division. “She said that the contract is already in process and that she anticipates having an answer for us this week or next,” Perkins said. “This is very good news.”
‘We’ve been defunded in the past’
This isn’t the first time that Vail’s clubhouses have faced closure, Bolstrom said.
Five years ago, when the global pandemic forced many nonprofits to close their doors, Vail came up with a way to keep clubhouse programs going: “We turned to Zoom in a week, got out and delivered toilet paper and talked to our members. We stayed open.” The clubhouses weathered that storm, and they are committed to weathering this one, too, but, somehow, he said, these cuts “feel more difficult and potentially impacting than what we faced during the pandemic. We are talking about fundamental changes to the way we’ve supported people with less in our society.”
Another time Vail Communities’ clubhouses faced defunding was in 2022, when Hennepin County, which had supported the Minneapolis and Hopkins locations for over 30 years, announced that it would no longer fund the Minneapolis clubhouse. Faced with this dilemma, clubhouse members voted to split the allotted funds between the two locations, meeting at Hopkins one week and Minneapolis the next.
The members’ decision caught the attention of staff at DHS, Perkins said, because “most mental health client communities don’t get the opportunity to design what they were going to do in response to a funding cut.”
This led Nathan Chomilo, the state’s Medicaid director, to visit the Minneapolis clubhouse, Perkins said. Inspired by that visit, Perkins said a decision was made to “re-fund Minneapolis —and they said they would also fund a new location of our choice.” That’s how the St. Paul clubhouse came into existence.
In 2024, leadership changes at DHS again put Clubhouse funding in question, but Perkins said she met with Neal. “She was encouraging,” Perkins said of Neal. “She told me, ‘We do not want to cut services. We want to be able to study this and expand it.’”
This year’s cut, triggered by what Perkins calls a “Trump administration clawback,” feels more serious. Bolstrom said that since the April announcement, he’s been making the rounds, letting supporters know that two of the Twin Cities clubhouses could soon be closing their doors. “We are going to need help now pressing state funders and moving forward to secure funding for our clubhouses.”
One of the key messages that Bolstrom and Perkins are trying to get across in their conversations with potential funders is that clubhouse programs are low-cost ways of keeping people with severe and persistent mental illnesses like schizophrenia and bipolar disorder out of the hospital and in the community.
“Cutting prevention programs like clubhouse that keep people healthy will lead to much more costly societal impacts,” Bolstrom said. “It costs the same amount to support a member in a clubhouse for a year as it does for a two-week inpatient stay in a hospital.”
While Perkins remains hopeful that DHS leadership will find a way to continue the department’s financial support of the Vail Communities clubhouses, she isn’t expecting an update anytime soon.
“I don’t think that DHS is going to be able to move that fast,” Perkins said. “I don’t think they’ll be able to have a contract ready in a week. They have their hands full with the hundreds of providers that they are also having to discuss all of these topics with right now.”
The truth is, Perkins said, running a mental health clubhouse doesn’t cost that much — especially when you consider the number of members each location serves. She estimates that it costs $400,000-$500,000 a year to operate a clubhouse that serves 700-1,200 people.
“It’s not like we’re asking for $5 million,” Perkins said. Vail needs around $900,000 to operate both locations for one year. She’s holding out hope that DHS funding will be secured before the end of June. “Our hope is they will make this right and they’ll do it quickly. We have been through hard times before and I’m sure that we will get through this, too. But I just can’t sit silent when things like this happen. This hurts people who need help.”
