Stop & ​“Shop” For Mental Health

From now on when you go shopping for milk and groceries at the Stop & Shop on Whalley Avenue, you can also pick up breathing techniques to lessen stress and tips on how to better communicate with your kids, and a whole range of other mental and behavioral health services.

It’s such a bargain, it won’t cost you a penny.

That’s because the S&S on Whalley, a gathering place for moms and their kids, next month will become the first “hub” of an expected 12 citywide that MOMs Partnership is setting up in the city.

It’s the first-ever community health screening and ​“help desk” to be set up in a grocery store anywhere in the country, said Dr. Megan Smith of the Yale University School of Medicine’s Departments of Psychiatry & Public Health (pictured).

Newman Architects is building a welcoming suite of desks immediately to the left of one of the entry doors, smack dab where the cereal and bargains were on sale Monday afternoon. Two dozen officials from the state and city, including Lt. Gov. Nancy Wyman, came by to announce a $3.7 million state grant for the project.

The $3.7 million grant will allow the Stop & Shop hub and three others to open within about six weeks. The other sites will be the West Rock Authors Academy, formerly the Micro Society School on Valley Street in West Hills and the Boys and Girls Club on Columbus Avenue in the Hill.

Smith said that each new hub will serve approximately 200 new mothers; that’s over and above the 3,000 moms the organization has reached since its founding in 2010.

The primary funding for the project is the first the state has received from the Hurricane Sandy Supplemental Social Services Block grant fund to address social and mental health needs of those affected by the eponymous storm, said state Department of Social Services Commissioner Roderick Bremby. He was one of the many officials speaking in the brightly lit area soon to be the hub, where a ribbon will be cut in January.

It’s such a sensible idea – to bring mental health services to a place often frequented and without stigma – it’s surprising it wasn’t thought of before, said Wyman.

Actually it was.

As soon as Stop & Shop store Manager Anne Demchak (pictured) took over in 2011 she hired an area organizer, Kate Walton, to do community outreach. The two of of them cooked up the idea of a “concierge desk” for healthful items—that’s a variant on the S&S corporate tag line— but items far beyond food.

The idea percolated up the S & S management. It was nudged into reality when one of the groups meeting informally in the community room at the store, the New Haven MOMs Partnership, a program of the Yale School of Medicine, took it to the next level and was able to involve the state Department of Social Services and to secure funding.

Click here for a fuller description of the “hub” concept, which envisions a trained staff “ambassador” who will screen, disseminate diapers, and refer interested moms to jobs, part of one-stop-shopping for mental health “solutions,” according to material distributed.

MOMs Partnership Ambassador Natasha Rivera-Labuthie will manage the Whalley Avenue site when it opens next month. A mother of three, including twins, she sought the help of the partnership three years ago and liked their one-on-one approach, addressing the specific needs of individual women instead of seeing moms, especially single moms, as a group or category.

“I like the idea that they listen to each individual mom’s story,” she said.

Now she’ll be doing the same when moms come in.

“We’ll ask about their goals, concerns,” she said. If a mother is interested, Rivera-Labuthie said, a primary service her group can offer will be an eight-week course in ​“cognitive behavioral therapy.” That includes breathing exercises to reduce stress and family problem management techniques.

Those classes, taught by Rivera-Labuthie and others, will take place in the store too, in the community room right above, on the second floor. That also will be the room that other of the partnership subcontractors — clinicians from the Clifford Beers clinic, among others — will be able to consult privately with moms, and other referrals, if necessary, can be made.

The longer-term city goal is to have a total 12 hubs in New Haven, along with an additional group of trained ambassadors hired to staff each of them by 2017. That number includes three on former brown fields, to be funded by funds specifically earmarked for those purposes through the state Department of Energy and Environmental Services.

Yale’s Smith’s said DSS’s Bremby’s ultimate goal is to scale up New Haven’s pioneering idea of the grocery store or meeting place hub to a total of 38 sites throughout the state.

The hope is that funding for such an ambitious expansion will come through a ​“pay for success” model program through the White House’s Office of Social Innovation and Civic Participation, she added.