The University of Oregon Ballmer Institute for Children’s Behavioral Health will launch its new Catalyst Center for Youth Behavioral Health on Sept. 1.
The center will house the pilot for the institute’s expansion of its undergraduate child mental health training program. That expansion will begin with a partnership between three universities in as many states, which are set to be chosen in early winter.
The universities will each receive a $30 million grant and support from the Catalyst Center to launch a training program based on the model at the University of Oregon.
Katie McLaughlin, the Executive Director of the Ballmer Institute, said the center would not be possible without a $125 million grant from the Ballmer Group.
“Higher ed is in a moment where there's a lot of questions about what a sustainable financial model will look like in the long term. It's a tough time for universities to invest in building new programs because that takes time and money,” McLaughlin said. “We're just incredibly honored and grateful for the support and to be able to bring other universities and states into partnership with us to really build this new workforce together.”
In the weeks leading up to the launch, McLaughlin said a team will be hired and potential university partners will be evaluated.
“We’ll be following a model that Ballmer Group uses when it approaches this question of, how do you scale something? How do you bring something from one place where it’s been successful to many places, which is to first test the idea in a red state and a blue state and a purple state,” she said.
That way, the program can be adapted to fit the community and needs of diverse state contexts.
The push to expand comes from the uniqueness of the program, the first of its kind to offer undergraduate students hands-on experience delivering behavioral health services to kids and families.
That kind of training historically required going to graduate school.
McLaughlin said, after the program’s second graduating class exited the institute this summer, the program is already showing an impact.
“Those students have delivered over 5000 hours of behavioral health services to kids in the Portland community, free of charge. But we've shown, through a really careful program evaluation of the impact of those services, that the majority of kids who get services from our students improve in terms of their mental health,” she said.
And, she said, the majority of graduates from the institute found jobs with the partner programs that helped train them.
McLaughlin said she hopes the Catalyst Center will bring that success to other states, growing the workforce of child behavioral health providers in a time of increased need.
“If we are able to bring this program to as many universities as we hope to be able to, over the next decade, we will literally train tens of thousands of new providers to work with kids,” she said. “We will support millions of kids across the country in getting access to services that they otherwise would not have been able to receive, and that is really the impact that we are hoping to have.”
