The Berkeley Wellness Center on University Avenue will close June 19. Credit: Nathan Dalton for Berkeleyside
The Berkeley Wellness Center, an arts-focused community space for people with mental health challenges, is closing this month after a change to how California allocates funding for behavioral health programs meant it lost funding from Alameda County.
The center on University Avenue in downtown Berkeley is one of seven wellness centers in the county due to close, according to Laura Weissberger, executive director of Bonita House, which operates Berkeley Wellness Center (BWC) and the Casa Ubuntu Wellness Center in East Oakland. One wellness center, located in Hayward, will remain open.
The loss of funding is due to the implementation of Proposition 1, a ballot initiative narrowly approved by voters in 2024 that sought to reform and expand the state behavioral health system. The law directed more of California’s mental health funding toward housing for the homeless, said James Wagner, a deputy director with the Alameda County Behavioral Health Department.
“That meant that a lot of our more preventative, non-crisis, non-acute … and discretionary services were vulnerable,” Wagner said. “The wellness centers fell in the discretionary category.”
Many of the wellness centers were given a lifeline recently when the Alameda County Board of Supervisors reinstated funding for certain “discretionary” programs for the upcoming year using money raised by the 2020 sales tax Measure W and other funding streams, but BWC was not one of them. It is scheduled to close June 19.
Bonita House was offered continued funding for its wellness center in East Oakland, but the organization had already vacated the space and given up its lease, according to Weissberger.
She is currently in discussions with the nonprofit Insight Housing in Berkeley about partnering to preserve some of the wellness center services in the community after BWC closes.
The center serves around 300 people per year, offering peer- and staff-led therapeutic groups and a variety of arts programming, including music therapy and classes. It even has a band that has performed multiple times.
The center also serves food and provides case management services. Clients are able to drop in anytime during operating hours five days a week, and groups occasionally go on outings to local parks and museums.
The origins of Berkeley Wellness Center date back to 1971 when Adelle Lemon, who worked at American Red Cross in Berkeley, founded the Creative Living Center, where “psychiatric halfway house clients could come, socialize, and get supportive guidance as they worked to navigate the outside world,” according to an article about Lemon and her husband on the Disciples Peace Fellowship website.
Even after retirement, Lemon continued to play Scrabble at the center each week. She died in 2020. The center became a Bonita House program in 1995.
Bonita House was founded in 1971 as a psychiatric residential treatment program in Berkeley and operates a large outpatient case management program, which links individuals with severe mental illnesses to resources in the community. It also offers 24/7 mobile crisis services throughout Alameda County, mostly dispatched through 911 and 988 calls.
The mobile crisis program was due to take a big hit with the implementation of Proposition 1, but the Alameda County Board of Supervisors “restored the full funding for this upcoming fiscal year as a bridge using Measure W funds,” according to Weissberger.
Wagner said the county will still provide wellness center clients with a variety of services, including case management programs, therapy, medication support and early intervention programs. And they can visit the one wellness center that will continue to operate in Hayward.
But M. Katy Macdonald, who worked as an art and health teacher at Creative Wellness Center for many years, called the closing of BWC “a disgraceful situation.”
“Many of my students are adrift,” she wrote in an email. Macdonald currently teaches art and health at Berkeley Adult School, and many of her former wellness center clients continue to work with her there.
One of her students, Scott, who recently turned 60, began attending the center in the mid-2000s. Scott, who asked that we not use his full name, still plays Scrabble most Fridays on the board that once belonged to Lemon. With the impending closure of BWC, he has joined several senior centers in the area, but said that “fitting in feels a bit iffy.”
There is a chance that funding for wellness centers will be extended after this upcoming fiscal year. But as of now, Wagner said, “those dollars have not been identified.”
“That will probably be a process that plays out all next fiscal year,” he said. “The world can change a lot in a year, and it’s certainly been nothing but constant change for us since COVID.”
Berkeley Wellness Center, 1909 University Ave., Berkeley. Phone: 510-809-3004
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