United Way Partner Program:
Behavioral Health Services
Catholic Charities West Michigan offers a variety of Behavioral Health programs through our Muskegon office. Some of these programs include Substance Use Disorder treatment, Mental Health Counseling, and Domestic Violence/Batterers Intervention treatment. Through these services, we work to assist clients in addressing their needs in order to be healthy, more productive members of their communities and families.
St. Gianna Child Baby & Toddler Pantry
These funds are for the provision of critical child safety classes at our Muskegon Baby and Toddler Pantry. The pantry serves families from Muskegon and the surrounding counties. The services are open to pregnant women and parents/guardians of children up to 5 years of age. The baby pantry offers free essential supplies to parents in need. These include clothing, diapers, wipes, formula, maternity items as well as other infant and toddler necessities. It also serves as a critical referral point to other important needs such as pregnancy counselling, mental health specialists, substance use disorder treatment, postpartum depression support, basic needs and domestic violence support. An important element of the pantry's work is hosting child safety classes for parents and guardians of young children. These high priority child safety topics include safe sleep, car seat safety, shaken baby syndrome and in-home safety. The classes are held two times per month. Classes educate approximately 25 families per month and are taught by Certified Car Seat Safety Technicians and nurses. The incentive based program is highly interactive and offers a free car seat or pack and play with basinet to participants who complete the course.
They are taught how to use these incentives to safely transport their children and to provide a safe sleep environment. Accidents and sleep related deaths are a leading cause of death among infants in Michigan. Sadly, preventable sleep related deaths are the leading cause of death among infants from 1 month to 1 year of age. Over the past decade, a young infant died of a sleep related cause every 3 days. Following the success of utilizing incentive items to encourage parental participation, we are seeking funding for these items as a critical tool to ensure the decrease in preventable deaths and accidents in young children in Muskegon and surrounding counties. By providing related safety items such as car seats and pack and plays, we are able to attract parents/guardians to participate and remove the financial barriers to using these items with their children. Our goal for these classes is to move the mark on some of the alarming safety statistics within the community by increasing awareness of the safe use of car seats, safe sleep, and prevention of traumatic injuries.
About Catholic Charities of West Michigan:
We are a community-based agency providing programs in Western Michigan, and offering a variety of services ranging from prevention and education to crisis intervention. We currently operate 52 programs designed to help families and individuals succeed. Our programs have 4 distinct areas of emphasis:
Family preservation services - these programs help provide family preservation and support services for families with CPS involvement. They work to stabilize and aid families with the purpose of avoiding CPS removal of minors from the home.
Child Welfare – this involves both foster care and adoption services. Our adoption services connect children in need with those hoping to become parents. In foster care programs the gol is t provide a safe and stable environment for a child, while working to reunify them with their birth family. Our foster parents provide the safety and security during the separation that are an integral part to the success of this process.
Behavioral health - our staff work with children, adults, couples, families to help them face the challenges of everyday life.
Community outreach - our community outreach initiatives help our communities by providing a variety of emergency supports while acting as a key connector to internal and other community resources. These programs continually evolve and expand to meet the ever-changing needs of the communities we serve.
