New mental health center works to normalize healing in Indy’s Mid-North neighborhoods

One in 5 Hoosiers experience mental illness, but many can’t seek treatment. The Martin Luther King Community Center opened the Beloved Community Outreach Center to expand its counseling services.

Kimberly Mathews is the mental health program director at the new center. She said the MLK Center has always offered mental health services, but the outreach center, which is located across the street from the MLK Center and Tarkington Park, allows the organization to better meet the needs of community members. The center’s three full-time counselors can work one-on-one with kids, adults and families or offer support groups.

“We wrap our families in every aspect of support that we can,”  Mathews said. “All the way from, if you wanted to look at saving to buy a house, if you need housing assistance – we have parent support groups if you are looking to find that community,”

The counseling services are free, and Mathews said the holistic approach of the center is what sets it apart from other organizations.

“We have both wellness coaches and counseling,” Mathews said. “So we address the present symptoms, but we're also going back to identify the root. So we can really set them up to be, like, well off and successful long term.”

The goal of the center is to normalize mental health care, MLK Center Executive Director Allison Luthe said.

“We want to normalize taking care of ourselves and seeking professional help is OK,” Luthe said. “Healing is essential to liberation. Because we keep recycling pain and trauma, we keep harming ourselves and each other, and we want to make it OK to not be OK and decide that now's the right time. We want to be here for you.”

The Beloved Community Outreach Center offers serves the MLK Center’s four surrounding neighborhoods: Butler-Tarkington, Meridian Kessler, Crown Hill and Mapleton-Fall Creek. To learn more, call the MLK center at 317-923-4581.

Contact WFYI health reporter Darian Benson at dbenson@wfyi.org. Follow on Twitter: @helloimdarian.