WATTS : 3 Generations Turn to Counseling Center

Christine Caraway had her hands full.

The mother of six, all with learning disabilities, was living in poverty in the heart of Watts in the mid-1960s and didn’t know where to turn.

“We’d go to church and to the schools, but they didn’t know what to say and do,” Caraway, 64, recalled.

So when the one-room Kaiser Permanente Watts Counseling and Learning Center opened in 1967, Caraway took her youngest two children, both of whom also had behavioral problems, there for help.

And like the rest of the parents who enrolled their children in the free counseling programs, she was obliged to participate in support groups to discuss her children’s progress.

“I found out I was the cause of a lot of their problems. I didn’t realize I had a drinking problem until they showed me,” said Caraway, a 17-year recovering alcoholic.

Tens of thousands of clients later, staff members still help parents at monthly meetings, educating them about self-esteem, establishing discipline and determining what to expect from their children at different stages of development.

“A goal of ours is for parents to be competent and use their skills through educational development of their children,” said Martha Watson, who has been with the center for 13 years and is in charge of counseling, after-school and internship programs.

Bill Coggins, the center’s founder and director, recalled that first parent discussion group. “They dealt with a gamut of problems in order to survive,” he said. “It was also a social outlet in a therapeutic way because after the ’65 riots there was nothing standing here.”

Shortly thereafter, he and social work professionals acted on a comment by one of the parents: “The parents were telling me, ‘It’s great what you’re doing for the children, but parents are people too,’ ” Coggins said.

As a third generation of area residents has gotten involved with the center, it has come to represent a pillar in the community. The center serves about 1,000 clients a year with a 22-member staff in an expanded building at 1465 E. 103rd St.

The nonprofit agency is sponsored as a community service project by Kaiser Foundation Hospitals, and supervised by the Clinical Services Department of Southern California Permanente Group. Families don’t have to be Kaiser members to receive the center’s free services.

Currently pursuing a degree in social work at Compton College, Annette Bozeman, 35, Caraway’s youngest daughter, attributes much of who she is today to the center’s counseling and education programs.

“As a young African American woman, I grew up with low self-opinion,” said Bozeman, whose daughter Keyausha Dupree, 15, is participating in a similar personal development group for teens.

“It was not only my family environment, but my environment as a whole,” Bozeman said. “The center gave me a different outlook on that.”

From the time she was 8 until she graduated from Jordan High, Bozeman went through different stages of counseling at the center. But it wasn’t to be the last.

In spring of 1992, she saw her beauty salon of 11 years go up in flames at Florence Avenue and Figueroa Street during the riots.

“The transition from being self-sufficient to going into a position where I didn’t have any income put me over the edge.”

When the unrest subsided, Bozeman said the center was the first place she visited.

“When something bad happens to you, there is always a place where you can go. That’s what the center is for me.”