This issue’s cover is a photo of children working on a mural for the Mural Arts Program Porch Light Initiative, in partnership with Drexel’s 11th Street Family Health Services.
Next fall, Drexel’s 11th Street Family Health Services will double in physical size, thanks to a $2.5 million gift from University supporters Sandra and Stephen Sheller. But the North Philadelphia center will gain more than just square footage. With the expansion comes the opportunity to diversify the ways it helps those in the surrounding community.
In addition to primary care and dentistry to serve the four public housing developments that surround it, the center has also focused on behavioral health, using creative art therapy as one of its pillars.
The therapy services are particularly important for the center’s patients — many face daily violence and poverty in their North Philadelphia neighborhood, and are often unable to sufficiently express their emotions through ordinary means, says Drexel’s Lindsay Edwards, a registered dance and music therapist and director of creative arts therapies at the center.
“Creative arts therapy makes behavioral health more approachable and can be a way to speak the unspeakable, because how are you going to have words to explain it?” she says. “It allows for subtle expression when the client is ready to do so and allows for more healing on the preconscious and conscious levels as a precursor to other types of healing.”
In a related effort, the center partnered with the Philadelphia Mural Arts Program’s Porch Light Program to create a public mural each year in 2013 and 2014. Though the initiative has now concluded, the center is considering folding a mural element into its art therapy program, Edwards says.
“Creative arts therapy makes behavioral health more approachable and can be a way to speak the unspeakable, because how are you going to have words to explain it?”
“We’re taking the momentum that was built around arts and healing because there has been a community built around it,” she says.
Sandra Sheller, who with her husband, Stephen, made the gift for the center’s expansion, is herself a creative arts therapist, so it’s only natural for such programs to be an integral part of what the center does, says Patricia Gerrity, associate dean for community programs and director of 11th Street Family Health Services.
The expanded health center building will be approximately 34,000 square feet, about double the size of the current 17,000 square foot space. The staff handled more than 32,000 clinical visits from patients last year, a number that challenged the capacity of the original facility. The new two-story expansion will also provide space for more students and faculty from Drexel’s College of Nursing and Health Professions to train in interdisciplinary care.
Dedicated space in the new wing will be available for more primary care visits, as well as for services provided by graduate students in Drexel’s Department of Couple and Family Therapy, plus new studio space for dance, music and the art therapies.
The expanded building will be renamed the Stephen and Sandra Sheller 11th Street Family Health Services Center. Construction is expected to be complete in the fall of 2015.