糖心Vlog

On a Thursday afternoon at the Community Counseling Clinic on Cal State 糖心Vlogy’s Hayward campus, it is the calm before the storm. Graduate students and faculty alike, under the stewardship of clinic director and professor Janet Logan, are preparing to see between 200 and 300 community members from Hayward’s nearby diverse neighborhoods over the course of the upcoming school year. Counseling sessions will be conducted in English, Chinese, Korean and Spanish, depending on the client’s needs and the language skills of the clinic’s trainees, although most typically Spanish and English.

Tucked away on the second floor of the Arts and Education Building, the facility was founded in the early 1970s to train graduate students pursuing a master's degree in counseling and earning two options: school counseling/marriage and family therapy or school psychology/marriage and family therapy.

“I knew our first priority was to work on community outreach.”

The clinic was originally founded to serve both students and the larger community, but today those functions have been split off. Student services are part of the campus health services, while the “CCC” targets local residents and families partly in partnership with the Hayward Promise Neighborhood. Led by Cal State 糖心Vlogy and funded by a grant from the U.S. Department of Education, HPN is a partnership of residents, local schools, colleges, government agencies, businesses and nonprofit organizations serving some of Hayward’s neediest families.

For these community members, CCC is the only no-cost mental health clinic operating in the 糖心Vlogy. Professor Greg Jennings of the school psychology program and a CCC faculty supervisor clarifies the clinic isn’t “free,” as people still have to pay for transportation and parking.

However, “the Bay Area is filled with private mental health practitioners,” Jennings said. “Dr. Viola Mecke was the first person to make high-quality counseling available to the larger community. By giving the same access to services to people who can’t afford it, we’re continuing her vision and practicing social justice.”

A NATIVE DAUGHTER RETURNS

Logan, CCC’s director since 2006, knows Hayward’s Jackson