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Projects with Promise

Vol. 22 No. 3

The Community Counseling, Education, and Research Center (CCERC) Model: Addressing Community Mental Health Needs Through Engagement Scholarship

Submitted
October 1, 2018
Published
2018-09-30

Abstract

Providing access to high-quality health services for all people is a national problem further compounded when the focus is mental health. Long-term primary prevention strategies and solutions, foundational to best practices in public health, are often considered at odds with short-term profit-driven private sector approaches within the capitalistic economy of the United States. Engagement scholarship, then, provides a uniquely viable, adaptable, responsive, customizable, and sustainable set of structures, mechanisms, and processes to address pressing societal needs. The CCERC model of engaged scholarship offers an example of community engagement, transformative and exceptional in addressing these societal and structural health care problems, with potential for customizable and contextual scalability. Specifically, world-class health care as a human right and an organizational value can be operationalized with engagement scholarship, which has the creativity and capacity to transform institutional values into purposeful and practical vehicles of community change.