Hi, I'm Ruth Drasin and I joined A Home Within in 2009. I had originally heard about A Home Within when I was on a ski trip on the west coast and there was somebody there from San Francisco who had just started volunteering for the program, and he told me about Toni Heineman and the model, and I was just so taken by it and I thought 'if I ever have the chance to be part of that, I would love to be.' So, a couple years later when I received a letter in a mailing from A Home Within asking for people who wanted to start chapters, I volunteered. And it was kind of a slow start initially. I had a co-leader for a few years, and we slowly built the chapter.

And then after that, I joined with Ayelet Barkai, who is my co-leader to this day. Ayelet and I really love running the chapter together. We have gatherings, which is a really nice part of what we do, where we often have a speaker and good dinner two or three times a year. We’re hosted by our colleague who has us to her house. It's really just cozy and nice. We have had a lot of really wonderful speakers. Ayelet and I both run consultation groups, and they've both been going on for years. So we have about maybe 20 or 25 cases usually going on and most people are in consultation groups. We take the A Home Within model very seriously. We like to really try and give to our volunteers through consultation, through good food, and educational programs. It's just a really nice place to be.

For me, one of the best parts of A Home Within is that I'm able to work with, think about, and contribute to the lives of people who are often not able to access private psychotherapy. A lot of times therapy they would get through going to clinics or hospitals would be short-term, every other week at the most. So I feel like I get to contribute to the lives of people who normally would not come to private practice. And I've worked with one person for over 10 years through A Home Within who has really just impacted me in his resilience. He certainly did not get good luck in life, in terms of his background, his family, so many things – and he's just been incredibly resilient. I've helped him to find his birth family and to work, and have a relationship, and I feel really inspired by him.

I like A Home Within the way it is. I hope that as it grows it holds onto its homey, personal, not too corporate vibe.

We always tell our new volunteers that you never know what's going to happen. Sometimes you can be assigned a case and it takes off. But more often the beginning with this population is pretty bumpy. We tolerate lots of no-shows: people starting, stopping, giving mixed messages. We really try and understand that this population has a hard time, for understandable reasons, getting started, and we consider that part of the work.