Community-based mental health and long-term residential treatment program
Where Health Care is Truly a Human Right
Community-based mental health and long-term residential treatment program
Where Health Care is Truly a Human Right
Berkeley Place, Inc. has provided a 24-hour long-term residential treatment home, called Casa de la Vida, and a Deaf and Disabilities Project to Alameda County and the City of Berkeley for 50 years; assisting men and women, ages 18 through 69 years old, who are reentering back into society after a psychiatric hospitalization, or, from, Santa Rita jail, who are suffering from acute to moderate mental illness and disabilities. They come to our caring home for long-term, supportive living, and social rehabilitation, that is all within a licensed family group therapy sessions, while relearning social sustainability for independent living - in what we have fought for decades in creating, which is: community-based mental health.
Upon entering into our home, each resident is referred to us by Alameda County's Behavioral Healthcare Agency; where we then warmly greet them onsite, with a licensed counselor who immediately does a needs assessment intake of each resident who are then introduced to our daily and weekly programming, that includes: coping skills, life skills, food and nutrition, and art therapy programs in a dignifying, supportive and empowering, environment for independent living. Our leading counselors are all licensed, and rotate shifts on a 24 hour/seven days, per week, basis. They
Berkeley Place inc. was founded in 1972 by a group of UC Berkeley undergrad students who had been volunteers at the Adolescent Program at Napa State Hospital. Their groundbreaking plan was to serve those in need of social rehabilitation in a caring non-judgmental and non-clinical approach, where residents empowered one another to succeed in everyday tasks. Initial funding came from community based support. In 1978, then-Assemblymember Tom Bates made Berkeley Place Inc, a State legislative model for the Community Residential Treatment Act. We now celebrate 50-years of breaking the brutal cycle of repeated psychiatric hospitalizations and prison revolving door system.
Our previous long-term leased facility was lost in a fire and the process to license our new location has taken longer than anticipated. We are in urgent need of up to six months of transitional funding while we await our reopening. With your donation, we can save our community mental health resource for many years to