A Winston-Salem foundation has given United Family Services a 2-year, $65,078 grant to help expand a community-based mental-health counseling center at the Ada Jenkins Center, on Davidson’s West Side.
Kathryn Firmin-Sellers PhD, director of the Lake Norman-Mooresville region for United Family Services, said the grant came from the Kate B. Reynolds Charitable Trust, of Winston-Salem.
“United Family Services began providing clinical counseling at the Ada Jenkins Center in January 2009,” Dr. Firmin-Sellers said in a press release. “We work primarily with children and families at the Ada Jenkins Center LearnWorks program, and with uninsured adults referred by the center’s Free Clinic of Our Towns.”
The grant will help expand the counseling program, allowing the organization to hire a bilingual counselor and extend services to 200 more individuals and families, Dr. Firmin-Sellers said.
The grant comes as United Family Services copes with cuts in funding from other sources. Among those is the United Way of Central Carolinas, which in the past has provided about one quarter of UFS’s funding. This year, United Way trimmed its grants to UFS by 17.8 percent. But money for mental health counseling, including the program at Ada Jenkins, fell only about 8 percent.
UFS was founded in 1909 and expanded its services to the Mooresville-Lake Norman region in 2003. It served 1,339 people last year. The non-profit agency offers an array of crisis counseling services for those facing victimization, emotional or financial crises.
The Kate B. Reynolds Charitable Trust was created in 1947 by the will of Mrs. William N. Reynolds of Winston-Salem. Three quarters of the trust’s grants are designated for use for health-related programs and services across North Carolina and one-fourth for the poor and needy of Winston-Salem and Forsyth County.
