The Berkeley-based Pacific Center for Human Growth, which offers an array of affordable mental health services and support to the East Bay's LGBT community, has hired Leslie Ewing as its new executive director.
Ewing, who has a long history working with LGBT and HIV/AIDS organizations, started the job August 26.
In an e-mail, she wrote that she wants to be sure the center reaches "people in need by raising our profile in our own backyard." Ewing said that having lived in Berkeley and Oakland since 1981, she knows isolation isn't a matter of economics or gender or age.
"There are many of us living in the flats of Berkeley and the hills of Montclair with the same set of problems and sense of being all alone," she wrote. "It doesn't have to be that way and that is the message I hope to take to my immediate community."
Ewing wrote that she wants to do more inter-generational work. The center has an active youth program and a peer support group of older men, and she said that she's working with staff on a program that allows these two groups "to find a common project or goal." She said there's also a plan to restart an older women's group.
Ewing, 59, quipped that she identifies as "queer as hell." She has previously been a volunteer coordinator for the Names Project AIDS Memorial Quilt; board president of San Francisco's AIDS Emergency Fund; and director of merchandising for Under One Roof, among other positions.
Most recently, she was associate executive director of Lyon-Martin Health Services, a primary care community clinic in San Francisco that provides uninsured women and transgender people access to quality preventative health care.
According to Ewing, the Pacific Center, which has an annual budget of almost $500,000, reaches over 2,000 people in the East Bay each year. This includes 350 to 400 individuals who have received services through the mental health clinic, and more than 600 students and teachers who are reached through the Safer Schools Speakers Bureau.
The center's last director, Juan Barajas, left earlier this year to become a senior director in the Bay Area for the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation.
Ewing's salary is $75,000 plus basic medical benefits. She lives in Oakland.
She said that the Pacific Center has five staff members, including her, along with 12 intern therapists who volunteer their time under the supervision of 11 fully licensed therapists who are also volunteers.
"All of us at Pacific Center look forward to this next period in the agency's history under Leslie's leadership, feeling quite sure that her passion for community-building and Pacific Center's long-standing commitment to LGBT people in the East Bay are an excellent match," Robert Hopcke, board president, said in a statement.
Ewing wrote that everyone, including the board, "wants to continue working toward excellence and further improve accountability."
"A big part of my job is to do everything I can to be even more responsive to our stakeholders and their needs," she added.
Ewing encourages residents in the East Bay to drop by Pacific Center and consider getting involved. The center, which is located at 2712 Telegraph Road in Berkeley, is open on a drop-in basis on weekdays from 4 to 10 p.m.
"There is a place for you here," she wrote.
For more information, visit the center's Web site at http://www.pacificcenter.org .