Newsletter 03/29/2024

In This Newsletter: Berkeley Pride Resource Fair, Sponsor Us!, Job Opportunities, Community Program Updates, Clinical Application, HIV Program Update, Pacific Center Events, Community Interview, Outside Events, Donate, Support!

Save the date for the Pacific Center’s Berkeley Pride Resource Fair on Saturday August 17th, 2024.

Follow our newsletter and social media to stay updated!

Older and Out Group Facilitator

PEARLS Coach for Older Adults

Ryan White Associate Clinician

Grief Group Facilitator

Oakland Older and Out Support Group

Email mae@pacificcenter.org for questions or more information. 

Applications for the 24-25 clinical training cohort are live HERE.

Questions? Contact clinic@pacificcenter.org

Graduate level psychology trainees, master's level trainees and associates as well as newly licensed clinicians receive valuable training working with our diverse LGBTQIA+ and QTBIPOC clients.  Our year long program meets all Board of Behavioral Sciences & Board of Psychology licensing laws.  Clinicians in the training program are supervised by licensed clinicians.

Join the Pacific Center for Mental Health for a 9 week processing group for people with HIV/AIDS. It’s a place to build community and process themes related to HIV. We explore topics around embodying intersectional identities, sexuality, internalized HIV stigma, grief and loss, trauma and abuse, addiction, and isolation. Living Fully begins on Tuesday, April 16th and goes through June 11th, 2024 (5:30 - 7:00 pm PST). This group will meet over Zoom video every Tuesday for the following 9 weeks, excluding holidays.

Instructor bio: Melanie is a massive psychology and science nerd, and always stands in an anti-oppression framework. She is queer artist, white, first generation American, and a psychotherapist. She is highly relational as a therapist, and her style is anchored in cognitive science, attachment theory, mindfulness, social justice, parts work, and somatic psychology. Melanie values science equally with the domain of intuition and art. Melanie Ferrari is a Registered Associate Marriage and Family Therapist #125787, Registered Associate Professional Clinical Counselor #9630. Supervised by Pablo Navarrete-Martinez, LMFT # 113991)

If interested, please use this link!

Meditative Arts Workshop: Join us at the West Berkeley Family Wellness Center for two part immersive workshop blending art and mindfulness. Unleash your creativity and find inner peace through beadwork.

Instructor bio: Malika Rubin-Davis is a mixed race black woman who grew up in Sonoma County, Ca. She has always had an affinity for arts and crafts. This was supported by artistic parents, Waldorf education and a BA in Visual Art. She worked as an educator in East Bay Public Schools for seven years and is now finding her way as an artist and educator. She teaches Yoga, has shown her paintings in individual and group shows in the East Bay and finds joy in teaching the things that she loves. For Malika, the artistic process is incredibly grounding and helpful, especially with mediums that require repetition. As a child, she could spend hours making friendship bracelets or playing with a bead-loom. As an adult she is self-taught in some beading techniques. She finds the process of making beadwork a beautiful mixture of creative expressions, and meditative repetition. To learn more and sign up please visit: https://bit.ly/PCmeditativearts

EARTH~WATER~AIR~FIRE: A 4-week medicine making series connecting humans with each of the healing elements of nature.

**For QTBIPOC and BIPOC with Batul True Heart of Maaso Medicina

In this 4-week series we will make time to presence and connect with one element of nature per week. We will be curious about our emotional well-being as it relates to our relationship with nature. Made of the elements ourselves, we are each an integral part of nature. We will remember our humanness, and our own unique essence, as we transmit it through our medicines.

Instructor bio: Batul True Heart (they/them/theirs), is a 2Spirit, Yaqui~Chicanx~Panamanian traditional healer, community & clinical herbalist, and death companion living on Lisjan Ohlone Land in Huchiun, also known as Oakland, CA.

To learn more and sign up please visit: https://bit.ly/PCewaf

Mental Health at the Intersections (MHTI) is a FREE day-long conference for mental health providers and community workers that centers care & support for those who sit at the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality. This year we are focusing on the mental health and wellbeing of LGBTQIA+ BIPOC youth. There will be workshops for youth ages 11+ and workshops for adults who work with youth. 

Registration has opened, click here!  

Please reach out to our Training Program Manager, Glo Rodriguez at glo@pacificcenter.org with any questions. We hope you are able to join us.

Community Interview with Beckie

Describe your history with the Pacific Center.

Beckie: I was a facilitator for two groups as a peer leader for about 13 years until they folded. Covid kind of killed them, and we could never get back.

 What brought you to the Center?

Beckie: I live in Hayward, and we had an LGBTQ center here for a while. The Pacific Center came down and held a meeting to see if people were interested in joining any of the Pacific Center peer groups or starting peer groups. I attended that meeting and was listening to the peer groups that they had and didn’t have. I thought that one of the peer groups that was missing was an all inclusive group. They had a group for gay men. And previously married men. They had all of these groups, but they didn't have anything that just was inclusive for anybody that was on our spectrum, that identified anywhere in the LGBTQ plus plus community.

And so I talked to [former peer group coordinator] Anne Mitchell. And she thought it was a good idea too, so we started forming [the OutStanding Seniors group], and I actually ran it as a solo facilitator for about three years. I kept asking if I'd see somebody in the group that I thought would be a good facilitator. I'd ask, and I finally got one of them to step up, go get trained and be a co-facilitator. So that was good. That group went for 13 years. 

Then during COVID, I joined the Lesbold group and became a facilitator for them, because they were really suffering from the lack of a facilitator, and that was only on Zoom. It was very difficult during Covid, especially for seniors who are a lot less computer savvy, or didn't have computers, or didn't want to learn Zoom. So a lot of those groups didn't survive.

I was also in the Older and Out Group, meeting at the Hayward Senior Center. A couple of us went there to help more or less get it started, because we wanted it to be successful. But I wasn't getting a lot out of it, so I quit. At that time it was specifically a therapy group, but drop-in therapy groups just didn't work for me with different people attending every time.

 What was the Pacific Center like when you first started? How has it changed?

Beckie: When I first started, I thought they offered some really good programs, but I didn't attend in person except for the facilitator meetings, because [the Telegraph Avenue location] had major access issues for wheelchairs. And I didn't like going in the back door. Some of us don't like going in back doors, right?

The new building is more accessible, but lacks disabled parking. I've done a virtual tour of the new building, but have not been there, and probably will not go there. I’m almost 80, so I don't think I will ever see the new center. Accessibility definitely has been and is still an issue in certain ways, like parking, because I need a space where I can unload my scooter, a handicapped space.

 Anything else you have noticed?

Beckie: You know, I think even during Zoom, all our peer group meetings would have four, five, six people, while the transgender groups had 20 people or more. They had so many! At our facilitator meetings, the facilitators for the transgender groups would talk about having so many people that they had to divide into two meetings, or do waiting rooms. And [the other facilitators] were all sitting there being totally jealous!

Now there are so many young people [identifying as trans] that they have to have groups specifically for young people. I think it's good that the Pacific Center has answered that call.

One of the things I like about the Pacific Center is if there's a need for a group, or if somebody thinks there's a need, then they will support you and help get that started. I think they're very open to that.

 What do you think makes the Center stand out?

Beckie: Well, number one they're filling a need for the LGBTQ community. They understand that there's a reason that those of us in this community need to have our own special place. I mean, you could say the world has changed, but [there was a time when] we’d get thrown in jail for walking down the street in pants, or a woman walking with a short men’s hairdo. That was illegal when I was growing up in the San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles. Everything was very secretive. I can remember on the school bus holding hands with my girlfriend with a sweater thrown over our laps, and no way at school would you ever talk about it or act like that. And now there are groups in the schools, but there's still a lot of prejudice, and there's still a lot of people that did grow up in the fifties, sixties, seventies, even the eighties and nineties, or that have a lot of internalized homophobia and don't come out. 

So the Pacific Center fills that need. It gives you a place where you can go, where you can feel safe and attend groups of like-minded people. I think that's the most important thing about it and the most important reason to keep it going and support it.

 Was there any particular moment that you cherished during your time at the Center?

Beckie: What comes to mind is two strangers coming to my group and, two years later, attending their wedding, so just people getting together and forming friendships. And I do have a fondness and a fun feeling in my heart for Anne Mitchell, who started my group and supported it and was in charge of all the senior programs for most of the years that I was there. Because I always felt that I could call or email or whatever with a question or problem or issue, or a thought, and I would be heard.

 Are there any challenges you have seen the Center face over the years?

Beckie: Well, Covid was a huge challenge, and I think they did the best job anybody could have in stepping up to that. I think one of the challenges after Covid that, as far as I know, they still haven't really overcome is how to have a decent hybrid meeting and include those that still wanna stay home and Zoom in to a meeting. I don't know anything about the last three or four months, but I know up until that time, they had not bought proper equipment and created a good hybrid meeting room.

I was facilitating a meeting at the Concord Center and they had a meeting room with a huge monitor where everybody could see them and they could see most of the people in the room. And they had two big microphones in the middle of the tables, and all this really fancy equipment. And it worked. It actually worked quite well. So that would be one of my dreams for the Center. 

Also, they do need to keep their website updated. Over the years, including just recently, I can't tell you how many times I've had to send off a little note saying it is not updated. Their virtual presence needs to be tended to regularly.

Photography and interview credit: Mel Hofmann