Housing staff member draws on her experience to help others

Perhaps the reason that Jean Fillner is so good at reaching out to people who are new to our country, down on their luck or backed against the wall is this: She doesn’t look at them from the cozy confines of a bubble of privilege, a perspective that can turn into clucking over “those poor unfortunates.” Instead, Fillner peers at the people around her, both on and off her job as a personnel assistant in University Housing, then decides what she can offer them.

Which is a lot, as it often turns out. “I know how hard life can be,” she says. “I’ve lived though it, not read about it in a book.”

Fillner openly says she grew up as the daughter of an alcoholic mother and an abusive father. She married at a young age, had three children and then divorced her husband, turning into a single parent for the past 16 years.

She says she abused alcohol and drugs and “tried to drink my problems away. I realized I was becoming like my mother, and I didn’t want to have my kids experience what I had.”

Helping her cross the deep divide between wanting and doing was a church counselor, who simply told her she didn’t have to live like that, regardless of her family history.

“I realized that the only way to go forward was to go backward and work my way through it,” she says. So she began what became a decade of counseling, which she says helped her reimagine what her life could be.

Fillner decided that her new life would shuck off an old nemesis – alcohol. “I quit drinking 12 years ago and have been clean ever since,” she says.

And now she’s a counselor herself, volunteering to help people who need a boost. She gets referrals from social service agencies as well as friends.

“I take calls in the middle of the night or go places with them, but mostly I just listen,” says Fillner. “I have to keep giving away what I have, in order to feel at peace.”

She gives speeches in her outreach to others, quite a feat for someone so painfully shy as a child that she ran out of the classroom when she had to give a report. “My first speech 10 years ago was tough, but it meant a lot to me when a girl came up afterward with tears in her eyes.”

Reaching out is what Fillner does par excellence for University Housing. She coordinates employee recruitment for Housing’s custodial and food service operations. Her work is one reason Housing was named last year the best large employer in Dane County because of its minority hiring practices.

“It used to be that people would knock on our door, looking for employment, but that doesn’t happen anymore with the strong economy,” says Fillner.

So she recruits hard by working with the Dane County Job Center, community centers, civic groups, job fairs and homeless shelters. She visits several of those sites and brings with her exams and applications in English and Spanish, as well as an interpreter when needed.

For the past year Fillner has been working with Kosovo refugees working for the Housing food service. She used an interpreter, had the exam translated into Albanian and had a van transport them to work from Stoughton, where many refugees lived. (She also has a van running between Madison’s South Side and food service units at times when city bus connections are poor.)

Last year Housing offered an eight-week course in Spanish for its food service and custodial supervisors and translated menu order forms into Spanish and Albanian. But one of the best linguistic bridges has been built by food service customers.

“Our students are very open to different cultures,” says Fillner. “I’ve watched them going through the food lines and talking back and forth with Spanish and Albanian speakers, using words and phrases of different languages to understand each other.”

Cultural sensitivity was the topic for a panel discussion Fillner coordinated last month for Housing managers. Panelists told them what it feels like to be a refugee or a single mother or a homeless person.

All this round-the-clock bridging and listening and counseling is draining, so Fillner clears her head by moving her feet. “The first time I rented roller blades, I went around Lake Monona, and it was instant addiction,” she says with a smile.

She also mushes huskies. She hitches up her Siberian husky, Cobaka (Russian for “dog”), to a team of dogs and a sled owned by a friend. Then they hit the trail, snow or shine, since the sled has runners and wheels.

Something else that makes her eyes shine is her children: Josh, 24; Danielle, 18; and Jack, 16. “They’re all great kids,” she says warmly. “I’m so proud of them.”

Once her children are out in the world on their own – “when I grow up,” as Fillner puts it – she’s thinking about taking her own big leap in life.

“I’d like to work abroad for a nonprofit organization,” she says. “I never thought I had anything to offer before, but now I want to share any unique gifts I might have.”