Yvonne Howard wanted to be in the medical field for as long as she could remember, and after graduating from high school entered nursing school. But back then (a short 40 years ago), women in nursing school could not be married, so she chose love over a career and left school. It was not until decades later that she was catapulted back into medicine, when one of her sons was accidently shot and no one could figure out who to call to get him to the hospital. How could she be living in Two Rivers, so close to the Fairbanks ambulance service, yet so far from emergency medical care?
Yvonne’s solution? Start a rescue and ambulance service herself. In short order, she and eight other community members took the classes and were certified as Emergency Medical Technicians, insuring that no one else in the community would face the same crisis as Yvonne’s family had. Not long after, Yvonne, her husband, and youngest son moved to Eagle, where they still live. When Yvonne realized there was no emergency medical care there, she started another ambulance service for that community.
She also began doing volunteer elder care, becoming so close to Sarah Malcolm that Sara eventually moved into the Howard home. It was after she passed away that Yvonne accepted the job of being Eagle’s health aide. She held that position for 13 years, until 2011, when she transferred into the behavioral health section of Tanana Chiefs.
The transition was a natural one, according to Yvonne. “TCC had just started the program and it included a lot of things I already did as a health aide, in terms of counseling and helping people with substance abuse problems to get the treatment appropriate for them.” In 2015, she became a Behavioral Health Aide II, a job which offers a great deal of variety. She does intakes, assessments, makes referrals, sees individual clients, conducts groups, and performs community outreach such as helping the school offer educational programs about mental health and substance abuse. Her attitude is that when there is a problem or a person needing help, she will do whatever it takes to answer the need. To better serve the community, Yvonne obtained her chemical dependency counselor certification at the same time as her Behavioral Health Aide II position.
One of the chief frustrations of the job is that people do not always understand the limits of what a behavioral health aide can do. Says Yvonne, “You cannot make someone get help, and sometimes even when they desperately want help it can take many starts and stops before a person learns how to manage their mental health or addiction problem. There is also the issue of domestic violence, difficult enough to handle in a large city but much harder to deal with in a small community without a shelter and where it is not easy for the victim to leave.”
Still Yvonne plans to do the job for as long as she is effective. “The rewards come from seeing people complete their therapy or treatment programs. Sometimes I will get a thank you note from a client, telling me how much better they are now and that thrills me and makes up for the challenging times.”
When she is not working, Yvonne is busy with subsistence activities. She and her husband raised four children with the idea that if you didn’t grow it, hunt it, pick it, or fish it, you didn’t eat it. She also loves to knit and crochet, preserve food, and to work with birch bark and do beadwork, all skills she learned from elder Sarah Malcolm.
Yvonne hopes to see more behavioral health aides, not just in Eagle, but in all remote communities. The need is great but Yvonne wants people to see that it is not hopeless, that if helped early enough, people can lead happier and more productive lives.
Jessica Goff, the Program Manager for Behavioral Health and Yvonne’s supervisor, appreciates, “that Yvonne is always willing to take on extra work, especially assessments, to help our clients get into treatment faster. Yvonne also consistently goes the extra mile as a wonderfully patient trainer and knowledgeable resource for the whole BHA team.”