Jermaine ArmourN.C. Central University School of Education’s recent $2.3 million grant will help students improve mental health resources in a state that faces many barriers, according to Jeffery Warren, an associate dean at NCCU’s School of Education.
The Health Resources and Services Administration, the organization that provided NCCU with the grant, funds healthcare services across the United States. Warren, who applied for the grant, said that the grant will train students in professional counseling, educational counseling and clinical supervision.
The grant, called IMPACT NC, also focuses on serving rural and underserved communities through holistic care.
“I think over the years, the counseling profession and other counseling professions like social work, psychology, along with the medical fields, have realized…that the mental aspects of a person and the physical aspects of a person really go hand in hand, and you can’t really talk about the physical without talking about the mental or vice versa,” Warren said.
Warren said that the connections students make to integrated care and medical health providers through this program helps students “meet the whole person and not just aspects of that person.”
This is the eighth grant that Warren has brought to the university, totaling more than $5 million.
“If you look at North Carolina, there’s mental health deserts, where there’s very few, if any, mental health providers in the county…that presents a lot of barriers,” Warren said.
Haley Ross, a licensed clinical addiction specialist and graduate student at NCCU, works on the IMPACT NC grant with Warren. Ross hopes to return to her hometown of Whiteville, nearly an hour’s drive west of Wilmington, near the South Carolina border. There, mental health counseling is limited.
The four-year grant provides students with stipends during the program and job placement support after graduation. It also aims to help improve staff training, course enhancement and administration for the School of Education.
The grant has provided Ross with flexibility in her personal life, who is a mother who commutes from Charlotte to NCCU.
“It’s been amazing, because the support is amazing,” Ross said.
As a black woman pursuing counseling, Ross said that her professional impact will help influence people who look like her in underserved communities to seek the proper care in terms of mental health.
“I think that representation matters,” Ross said. “The more that we are seen in our community, the more they’re willing…to be a part of it or [to] learn.”
Warren said that he believes that the approach of integrated holistic healthcare helps counselors build deeper connections with patients, while positively influencing their mind, body and behavior.
“We have a focus on supporting the community, and not just the immediate community, but the larger community, the surrounding counties, [and] the state,” Warren said. “This grant does that.”
