Treating the Whole Woman

By Susan Woodworth

Wegi Louise and Wendy Passov are co-directors of the Women's Wholistic Center which recently moved into offices in the "Women's Wing" of the Civic. Known until recently as the Women's Growth Cooperative, it is a wellness center that provides counseling, groups, workshops, general massage, integration massage, polarity therapy, career counseling, nutrition services, aerobics, and water therapies. They can be reached from 10-5 daily and 9-12 Saturdays at 321-8582.

Where did the concept for the Center come from?

Wendy: It took eight years of planning in the Women's Growth Cooperative to get to a definition of counseling, feminism, and cooperative structure.

Wegi: What we wanted fitted into the concept of "whole"-to be complete as one. Feminism is the root of the whole.

Wendy: We finally realized that the women we were counseling were also affected tremendously by the foods they ate, how their bodies felt, and how they handled stress. This realization that we have to respond to the needs of the "whole" woman was crucial. Individual members of the Growth Coop were also becoming more interested in spirituality and bodywork, which made a significant difference in our future plans.

Wegi: We also knew that our feminist concept of counseling was very strong. That concept,is based on group work and helping women build support ... systems for themselves. We believe that women have a much greater chance to help each other and themselves in groups, and that isolation is still one of the biggest problems. We still offer groups as one of our main activities.

Wendy: Several years ago we were doing much more crisis counseling, like for battered women and divorce. Now we deal more with stress and offer a larger perspective.

Where do you get ideas for groups?

Wendy: We get ideas from the kind of calls we get and from the individual counseling we do. For instance, we're going to be doing a group on stress for nurses, and we're also going to do our anger workshops again.

How does your cooperative structure work?

Wendy: The co-director part works well because it is so much easier to deal with two people rather than an entire collective.

Wegi: We have a coordinator, a general staff person, a business manager and a bookkeeper. The concept of business management is very important for our expansion into this physical space. It was crucial for us to realize what skills we needed and to go out and get them.

Wendy: Now we're working on outreach into the community to find resource women to run our groups and share skills. These group leaders are paid.

Wegi: Our goal is to provide a growth process for women. We want to expand into more educational areas, too. I'm very interested in creating a good administrative structure that makes it a humane place to work.

I always thought “wholistic health" included some

attention to the medical aspects of health care. Do you plan to include this?

Wegi: No, we have no medical care plans. We are not a treatment center. We want to offer groups to keep women free of "dis-ease". We want to help women learn how to live well. The preventive part is crucial to our perspective.

Wendy: We may want to work with a gynecologist at some point.

How did you establish your fee structure?

Wendy: We try to be in the middle of a professional fee scale for our services. People should remember that we are entirely dependent on fees-we receive no funding. The benefits for our clients in our own physical space are important-they can see

for the most part. These women accept each other.

Friday nights will be drop-in nights for the women's community. Consciousness-raising and education will be available. Volunteers from the community will run it. The community will plan this time for itself as it sees fit.

What is a big issue that women face now?

Wegi: We all need protection from a splintered, negative world. I would say fear at all levels is a huge issue.

Wendy: Women'still need to be assertive. This is even more crucial now.

What is the Waterworks?

Wegi: The Waterworks is a group-size Jacuzzi, a

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Wegi Louise (1) and Wendy Passov (c) discuss the Women's Wholistic Health Center with Susan Woodworth (r). Photo by Louise Luczak.

women functining in a competent, clean, nice, positive environment. That's why we chose to pay. this overhead. It's a big shift in our mindset about what we are doing-that we can be effective on a larger scale.

Do you plan to provide services to any particular group of women?

Wendy: Our target population is the Heights area liberal/progressive population. Ours is the only organization like this that serves only women. Other places offer pieces of this, but not under one roof. And we still get many calls from women in the women's community who need support.

Wegi: Our divorce support groups reach women who have no other contact. Many women entered the women's community through our groups too. Activities such as aerobics are the "great leveller"--women learn to expose themselves to women unlike themselves and feel fine about it. What about services to lesbians?

Wendy: We have always cared about womanidentified women and we still do. We are open and supportive to lesbians. We do lesbian individual and group counseling and support.

Wegi: Again, we deal with the "whole" woman. Wendy: Our groups are mixed, straight and gay,

large sauna, shower, and locker-room. We will also offer body massage.

Wendy: Water therapy is great for stress and it fits in with aerobics and yoga. The Waterworks will open later on and will be part of our program. No men will be using these facilities. At the moment men can come as clients for counseling only before or after regular hours.

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What is your relationship to the Women's Building Fund?

Wendy: We are part of the women's building. There's confusion because we are the first tenant and we have advertised a lot. We do have an interconnected staff, and we want to support the building. The Women's Wholistic Center rents from the Women's Building Fund.

Can women do anything to help defray your costs or lower fees for your services.

Wendy: Women can help run the Friday night dropin, help do public relations, and do some fixing up. We could really use a fund-raising group to help raise money for women who can't afford our fees. What is the most significant change that the

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