Marquette champions new city mental health clinic
Lovell’s grant winner to serve trauma victims
One year ago, Marquette University President Mike Lovell took his campus by surprise, dangling a quarter-million-dollar grant as the prize for any team of faculty who could draft a plan that can “change the trajectory of lives” within the school’s surrounding communities.
The “President’s Grand Challenge” was Lovell’s way to goad a major Jesuit university to deepen its roots in one of the nation’s most impoverished inner cities.
On Wednesday, Lovell announced the winner: a mental health clinic tailored to the needs of one of Milwaukee’s most severely de-industrialized and downsized inner-city neighborhoods.
Delivering the fifth annual state-ofthe-university address since he was
named president, Lovell extolled the clinic’s ambitions to seek out children and families affected by the city’s epidemic of civilian psychological trauma and the mental disorders and developmental afflictions that arise with statistical predictability in the wake of violence, abuse, abandonment, drugs and chronic stress.
Like much of Wisconsin and the nation, Milwaukee lives with a shortage of qualified trauma-responsive social workers and mental health practitioners, said Amy Van Hecke, the Marquette psychology professor who spearheaded the grant application.
Lovell referred to his own traumatic experiences growing up in a family with a history of mental illness, a disclosure he initially made last year when he began to champion efforts to address the city’s trauma epidemic in a systematic fashion. Those efforts, which led to a fast-growing collective of social agencies and clinics, were launched at the same time as Lovell’s Grand Challenge but technically are separate.
“As someone who experienced childhood trauma myself, I know firsthand just how important these types of services are,” Lovell said Wednesday.
Crucial in a city known for extreme segregation, where racial distrust is deep enough to hamper efforts by wellintentioned 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.
A team of 10 Marquette faculty, led by a pair of psychology professors, will join with two African-American churches and other neighborhood institutions, which will form a city-wide referral pipeline for the clinic.
“It’s a solid team,” not one of tokenism, said Walter Lanier, pastor of the Progressive Baptist Church on Milwaukee’s northwest side. Lanier hosts the MIRACLE Network, a partner in the clinic, and also serves on the Milwaukee County Mental Health Board.
Also on board are True Love Baptist Ministries; the Milwaukee Coalition for Children’s Mental Health; Mental Health America of Wisconsin; the Milwaukee Area Technical College and the Milwaukee Succeeds Kindergarten Readiness Partnership.
“We are hoping the churches are a pathway, a conduit, instead of just a pop-up clinic,” Van Hecke said.
Because the clinic is tied to a university, it’s meant to serve as a training center for young people of color to become mental health practitioners, filling the void of qualified therapeutic services, Van Hecke said. Students from other schools than Marquette are eligible.
The idea is to break the generational cycle “that compounds itself with each generation,” Van Hecke said. “Women who experienced trauma are more likely to have children with developmental delays, and those children are four times more likely to be victims of trauma themselves.”
For the past two years, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel has documented how untreated trauma leads with statistical probability to dropouts, poverty, addiction, mental illness, homelessness, incarceration and suicide. Working with his wife, Amy, a mental health advocate, Lovell has led a collective called SWIM — Scaling Wellness in Milwaukee, which has drawn members from leading social agencies, medical centers, addiction specialists, criminal justice authorities and mental health agencies.
A total of eight teams of Marquette faculty applied for the two-year $250,000 grant, with funds furnished by the Johnson Controls Foundation. Lanier expects the clinic to become self-sustaining after the initial two years.
Van Hecke one day would like to build similar clinics on the city’s west and south sides.
“The Next Step Clinic is a truly interdisciplinary, collaborative idea that will provide a centrally located site for comprehensive, trauma-informed evaluation, assessment and treatment of mental and developmental health conditions,” Lovell said.
When he took over in 2014, Lovell became the first lay president of the Catholic university, which was run by Jesuit priests since its founding in 1881.
Separately in his address, Lovell announced a new $5 million Institute for Women’s Leadership, a research center to open by summer. It will focus on research and leadership development to gender equality in education and the workplace.
“Gender equity and inclusive representation in the workforce and education at all levels are critical topics both nationally and within our campus community at Marquette,” Lovell said.