Next Step Clinic Visual Identity Design |
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Amy Van Hecke, associate professor of psychology, and her team were awarded $250,000 for the Next Step Project as the winners of the President’s Challenge, which was announced during Marquette University President Michael Lovell’s presidential address Jan. 23.
A team consisting of Marquette University faculty and community partners have been selected as the first winner of the President’s Challenge Award. The team will open a new clinic, the Next Step Clinic, located at the Next Door Foundation, to address the mental health and developmental needs of Milwaukee’s underserved children and families. |
Next Step Clinic to receive $250,000 President’s Challenge Grant
The Next Step Clinic is a mental health clinic tailored to the needs of one of Milwaukee’s most severely de-industrialized and downsized inner-city neighborhoods. The clinic will seek out and serve Milwaukee families adversely affected by racial and socioeconomic health disparities, with a focus on families that have been experienced adverse childhood experiences, trauma and developmental delays, according the university.
Like much of Wisconsin and the nation, Milwaukee lives with a shortage of qualified trauma-responsive social workers and mental health practitioners.
Crucial in a city known for extreme segregation, where racial distrust is deep enough to hamper efforts by well-intentioned downtown agencies that parachute into neighborhoods without rapport, the proposed clinic will collaborate with existing grassroots organizations and churches.
The clinic will be housed inside the Next Door Foundation, an innovative neighborhood center in the heart of the once-industrial 30th Street corridor, a north-south succession of shuttered factories that in places looks like a canyon of industrial graveyards and barbed wire. Next Door’s facility itself is housed in a converted factory.
Like much of Wisconsin and the nation, Milwaukee lives with a shortage of qualified trauma-responsive social workers and mental health practitioners.
Crucial in a city known for extreme segregation, where racial distrust is deep enough to hamper efforts by well-intentioned downtown agencies that parachute into neighborhoods without rapport, the proposed clinic will collaborate with existing grassroots organizations and churches.
The clinic will be housed inside the Next Door Foundation, an innovative neighborhood center in the heart of the once-industrial 30th Street corridor, a north-south succession of shuttered factories that in places looks like a canyon of industrial graveyards and barbed wire. Next Door’s facility itself is housed in a converted factory.