Pilsen Wellness Center
The Pilsen Wellness Center, Inc., formerly known as the Pilsen-Little Village Community Mental Health Center, has provided culturally sensitive services to a multi-cultural population for over 40 years. Established in 1967 by community members seeking to address an evident gap in mental health care, the Center has offered quality and affordable services to persons with limited financial resources.
The Pilsen Wellness Center, Inc. has expanded its original Mental Health programming to include substance abuse treatment, youth and HIV prevention services, as well as alternative secondary education. With 9 programming sites located in communities with predominately Latino-origin residents in the Chicago land area, it remains one of the few community-based, human services organization with a 90 percent bilingual and bicultural staff.
Throughout the years, the Center has offered holistic human services to children and families which seek to preserve and support family health, stimulate economic development, and facilitate community empowerment through wellness.
Pilsen Wellness Center values the uniqueness of the bicultural person. This translates into supportive programs that appreciate how language and culture influence therapeutic strategies. This in-depth understanding facilitates a process of healing for participants by taking into consideration how levels of acculturation and the immigrant experience impact treatment services. Common among many Latinos, the immigrant experience is one of the most stressful events a family can undergo. The Center’s staff helps families address acculturation, behavioral, emotional, and adjustment problem issues.
Pilsen Wellness Center (PWC) employs a 70 percent bilingual and bicultural staff. PWC’s expertise rests on the ability to grasp the significance of acculturation and how life experiences are encoded in language. Facilitating the participant’s access to the effective or “emotional” aspect of a problem through the language in which it was experienced is a fundamental treatment component. Language and its subtleties, strongly related to identity, and expertise in treating acculturation difficulties are a hallmark of services provision.
PWC’s professionally-trained staff recognizes that the overall needs and dynamics of the family are integral to successful problem resolutions. Strong organizational and administrative linkages between and among the Center’s various programs ensure consistency, inter agency cooperation, and optimal interventions.
As an agency with deep roots in the community, the philosophic approach to general service delivery considers the traditions, values and culture of all program participants. The organization provides social services that are holistic, family focused, and tailored to the needs of participants.