Martha Long shaped The Village
Former director of revolutionary Long Beach mental health facility dies at 82 in Virginia
Martha Long, who shaped The Village mental health and rehabilitation center in downtown Long Beach from its beginning in 1990, has died. She was 82.
Long died at her home in Virginia late last month. No cause of death was released.
Throughout her long career, she worked to help those with mental illnesses have productive social lives, the hallmark of The Village, operated by Mental Health America of Los Angeles.
Long was born on Aug. 12, 1938, and raised in Texas and Michigan before going to Virginia to start her professional career, an obituary in the Washington
Post said. She was married for 20 years to Robert Charles Long before he died in 1980. The couple raised two children, Jason Parnell Long and Julia Keating Long Boland.
After college, Long worked her way up to become associate director of the Social Center, a psycho-social rehabilitation organization in Virginia. Long was appointed director of volunteerism for the state of Virginia and became a licensed wedding
officiant there as well.
That strong reputation made its way to the West Coast, where Richard Van Horn, president and CEO of MHA Los Angeles at the time, heard of her. He hired her as director of the nascent mental health facility called The Village.
“He remembered her in 1989 when the idea for a revolutionary mental health approach called The Village was first conceptualized by Mental Health America,” said Paul Barry, who worked with Long as associate director and later became director himself. “Dave Pilon, the director of community integration at MHA at the time, wrote the proposal to fund this revolution, and Richard hired Martha to turn it into reality.”
Long and MHA took a proactive approach to mental illness, taking a “yes, you can” attitude with members there. The Village didn’t, and still doesn’t, provide housing but offered almost everything else.
“Martha Long’s primary mantra, repeated to all staff when asked how to achieve some lofty goal, was to do ‘whatever it takes,’ ” Barry said. “She was well known for those words. This is not what traditional human service workers are told. Unfortunately, the field is often so risk averse that the answer to such questions are usually, ‘Do what’s safe,’ or ‘do what has been done for years.’ ”
The Village was headquartered in the basement of a former church, 456 Elm St., downtown. It moved to 1955 Long Beach Blvd. last year.
Most of the counseling and support work, however, takes place where the clients live and work. Small teams of clients work with a single staffer or a team of them on everything from counseling to job training.
One of the job training efforts turned into The Village Cookie Shoppe, a bakery and kitchen that has become locally famous for its cookies. It also has been the starting point for many stories of recovery.
“Under Martha’s leadership, the Village initiated a recovery approach, which was determined to help individuals with serious mental illness find or create a life not defined by the illness,” Barry said. “The outcomes were astonishing and measured. There were huge reductions in hospitalizations, jail time and homelessness while the increases in employment and school attendance were off the scale.”
Long stepped back in 2010 but stayed connected to The Village, working part time until 2015 on special projects before moving back to Virginia to be close to her children and grandchildren.
A memorial will take place in Michigan at a later date, according to the Washington Post obituary.