Mt. Zion Baptist Church and Anesis Therapy this week celebrated five years of providing free mental health services for the community on Madison’s south side, and continued to seek donations to build a new building for that and other community programs.
The weekly free drop-in clinic is open from 10 am to 2 pm every Thursday. It started in October 2020, in the depths of the COVID-19 pandemic.
At an event Monday, Senior Pastor Marcus Allen said the need was present long before the pandemic, as parishioners often came to him with issues he wasn’t fully able to address.
“Being a pastor, sometimes your spiritual knowledge and wisdom, your Biblical knowledge, does not suffice when someone is in deep depression, someone is schizophrenic, or someone is struggling with drug addiction, and I’ve had to deal with all of that as a pastor,” he said. “I know my goal was to be able to wrap somebody by hand, walk them down the hall and take it to a therapist to be able to help them beyond what I was able to.”
Since the church partnered with Anesis to open a weekly mental health clinic, it has served between 200 and 300 individuals every year – some once, some a few times, some weekly for an extended period.
Every session is 30 minutes, and focused on addressing issues and short-term solutions, rather than the deep trauma addressed in longer-term, traditional therapy.
In 2023, the clinic added crisis stabilization and case management services, with staff that can help people access housing, employment assistance, help in enrolling in Medicaid programs, and more.
Anesis therapy founder Myra McNair said the clinic arrived at the right time, but is still needed.
“(The need is) still the same. It’s never decreased, the amount of people that have utilized the services,” she said. “I think within the next few months we’re going to see an increase based on what is going on” in the nation.
She said the need, and utilization of the free clinic, ebbs and flows with what’s happening in the community.
“We’ll see a dip sometimes, and then an increase. When ICE was around and stuff, we will have a lot of clients that will stay home … So sometimes we’ll see a dip, and then we’ll see an increase. If there are some political things that are going on, sometimes we’ll see an increase. School shootings, we’ve seen increases. When there’s community violence or things like that, we’ll see an increase.”
The mental health clinic is operated by the church’s nonprofit arm, MTZ Charitable Organization, along with seven other programs serving children, families and the elderly. The church is raising $5 million to build a dedicated building to house those programs. Allen said the new building will not only allow for more privacy and confidentiality in the mental health clinic, but more office space for paperwork-intensive activities like case management.
Access to more mental health services has public safety implications as well, as Madison Police Chief Jeff Patterson and Dane County Sheriff Kalvin Barrett both said at the event.
“We have to embrace community partnerships like this,” Patterson said. “We have to continue to look for ways to divert people away from law enforcement, away from jail, away from outcomes that are just not going to help them.”
“Our jails and prisons continue to be the largest mental health facilities in our country, and that is wrong,” Barrett said. “We have over 30 programs and social services in our Dane County Jail. And the concern and the question that I have every single day is, why do people have to go to jail to get these? … We can find $207 million to build a new jail that was much needed. We can find $5 million to build a facility (at Mt. Zion).”
Donations are accepted at https://www.mtzcharitableorginc.com/donate.
