Help Center for Multicultural Human Services (CMHS)

Center for Multicultural Human Services (CMHS)

Falls Church, Virginia

Cause Description:
Our mission. The mission of CMHS is to help people from ethnically diverse backgrounds succeed by providing comprehensive, culturally sensitive mental health and related services and by conducting research and training to make such services more widely available. Our history. A 501(c)3 non-profit organization, CMHS began in 1982 as a foster care program for orphaned refugee children. As the demand for therapeutic and social services for language minority residents grew dramatically by the late 1980’s, CMHS developed a wide range of services in 30 languages and now serves more than 8,000 individuals and families annually throughout the Washington, DC metropolitan area. CMHS’s holistic, comprehensive model of services responds to the needs of today’s culturally diverse immigrants and refugees, most of whom arrive in the US from war-torn, impoverished countries. On July 1, 1995, CMHS was licensed by the Virginia Department of Mental Health, Mental Retardation and Substance Abuse Services as an outpatient mental health center and provider of substance abuse and home-based services. Through its “International C.H.I.L.D.” (Child Healing to Improve Learning and Development) program, CMHS became a founding member of a national network of treatment providers funded by the Department of Health and Human Services to develop and implement services for child and adolescent victims of trauma. CMHS is also part of a nationwide network of service providers to victims of politically motivated torture funded by the United Nations Voluntary Fund and the Department of Health and Human Services. CMHS is staffed by over 80 multilingual, multicultural clinical psychologists, psychiatrists, counselors, therapists and social workers who come from all over the world and speak a combined total of 30 languages. Most hold Masters or doctoral degrees and many are licensed. CMHS serves as a training site for an annual average of 25 graduate-level interns in psychology, counseling and social work from twelve area universities. Over 100 multicultural volunteers provide a wide variety of services and direct client support. Languages. Services are available in the following languages: English • Farsi • Spanish • Arabic • German • Somali • Dari • Punjabi • Hungarian • Tagalog • Indonesian Cantonese • Vietnamese • Urdu • Japanese • Hindi • Mandarin • French • Bosnian/Serbo-Croatian • Korean Italian Portuguese • Malay • Amharic • Russian • Pashtou • Khmer • Tamil • Malayalam • Krio • Hebrew

Type: Environmental
Listed on iGive since: October 2004
iGive members supporting: 2

Website: www.cmhs.org

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