New clinic on St. Paul’s East Side expands mental health and substance abuse services for kids

Children and teens will have improved access to mental health and substance abuse treatment thanks to a new clinic on St. Paul’s East Side.

Wilder East Clinic opened last month at 445 Etna St., just north of Interstate 94.

The Wilder Foundation decided to expand its services due to a growing need for services for children and long wait times at its site on University Avenue in St. Paul.

When it came to choosing the location, the foundation listened to families it already served and looked at which communities didn’t have much access to the services it offers, said Pahoua Yang, vice president of Community Mental Health and Wellness at the Wilder Foundation.

Yang, who grew up on the East Side, the epicenter of Minnesota’s Hmong community, said she and her colleagues saw it as an opportunity to address a shortage of mental health care available for children across the Twin Cities, while providing culturally specific care for her community and others that call the East Side area home.

“Many of our staff are from the communities that we’re serving,” Yang said. “[They] have a lot of experience serving our communities, and for many of our staff, opening the clinic on the East Side is like coming home for them.”

The new clinic has 11 full-time mental health practitioners, some of whom work with infants and children up to age 5, while the rest serve children ages 6 to 18. They treat not just the child but the child’s family as well, said Vanessa Ng, Wilder East’s clinical director.

“The child is never in a vacuum coming in through the door, so we try to get family engagement and participation,” Ng said. “If the child is presenting as unstably housed, that’s because the family is unstably housed, and it’s really hard to address the individual child issue without making sure that the family has security and resources and a foundation of health in order to support the child.”