Five Years of the Mental Health Talent Pipeline: A conversation with USF’s Dean Shabnam Koirala-Azad

The Healthcare Foundation’s Mental Health Talent Pipeline (MHTP) scholarship program, launched in 2018 in partnership with the University of San Francisco and its Santa Rosa branch, aims to boost the number of bilingual and bicultural mental health professionals available to serve children, youth, and families in northern Sonoma County lacking such bilingual and bicultural services.

After a successful pilot year, the partnership and MHTP expanded to fully cover tuition for graduate students, who have averaged three new participants annually since 2019. To date, MHTP has supported 24 students, benefiting about 3,500 residents with mental health services.

In closing the accessibility gap in bilingual and bicultural mental health services for Latine residents of northern Sonoma County — and helping to clear a path for tomorrow’s community leaders by supporting a new generation of aspiring mental health professionals — MHTP advances the Healthcare Foundation’s strategic focus on mental health as well as USF’s vision of directly serving the communities where it has its programs.

To help us mark MHTP’s five-year milestone, we spoke with Shabnam Koirala-Azad, Dean of the School of Education at USF. A former faculty member in International and Multicultural Education, she has been a key partner in the program’s growth since its inception.

USF has a graduate program in counseling psychology based at Santa Rosa Junior College. Why is that?

USF used to have a Santa Rosa campus. In 2017-2018, the university decided to close the campus, partly because some other programs decided not to run their programs out of Santa Rosa. We, in the School of Education, were running two healthy programs at the time, our Master of Arts in Teaching and our MFT [Marriage and Family Therapy] program, which is our licensure program in counseling psychology where we train counselors. These two programs were running well and we felt they were serving Sonoma County at large. So, we weren’t quite ready to call it quits in Sonoma County. As I considered options for how we would continue, one idea that emerged was to partner with the local community college. That was exciting on many levels. It would allow us to be more integrated in and with the community and to have access to a campus community. Santa Rosa Junior College became that perfect location that would allow us the type of close partnership where we could pursue our vision for running programs that would continue to meet the needs of the wider Sonoma County community.

“The Mental Health Talent Pipeline is such a beautiful example of how foundations and institutions of higher education can partner to make a real impact in communities.”

Shabnam Koirala-Azad, Dean of Education at USF

What is your vision as Dean for this Santa Rosa–based graduate program?

Our mission in the School of Education has always been to diversify the mental health and education professions. We’re trying to reach populations who have historically been left out of these professions and these opportunities but are so needed to meet the needs of diverse populations in culturally specific and impactful ways. At the same time, a challenge for us is that we’re a private university with a pretty high sticker price when it comes to tuition. Those two things tend to be in tension, so part of my work has always been to figure out how we can make our programs accessible to a wider group of students. In that effort, I give a lot of credit to our faculty member overseeing the MFT program in Santa Rosa, Daniela Domínguez. She really took on my charge to ensure the program is integrated in Sonoma County, to recruit students from the area, and to support these students — she has just gone above and beyond towards achieving this vision.

How did the partnership with the Healthcare Foundation come in?

The initial connection to the Healthcare Foundation, to [then Executive Director] Kim Bender, was made by Dr. Dominguez. In their conversations, it became clear that the Healthcare Foundation was interested in supporting the vision of our MFT program — particularly in making sure that the program focused on training mental health professionals for Sonoma County — that’s when I entered the conversation. We started thinking about creative ways in which the Healthcare Foundation could support the training of these students. Our job would be to train them as excellent community-oriented counselors — and particularly to train them as bicultural, bilingual healthcare professionals to serve the migrant population of Sonoma County, where there are gaps in mental health care. As we’re commemorating this five-year milestone, it’s amazing to think about how many professionals we’ve now placed in Sonoma County that serve the Latine and Spanish-speaking population. The Mental Health Talent Pipeline is such a beautiful example of how foundations and institutions of higher education can partner to make a real impact in communities. 

How has the program and partnership developed since that initial pilot year?

This is where I have a lot of admiration for Kim in her role as executive director, because the scholarship program started out small with scholarship support for one or two students initially. Then, a few years ago, as we started to recognize the impact of the partnership, Kim was convinced we could expand the program. She pledged to work with the Healthcare Foundation and the program’s funders to formalize it and increase the funding available. And she did it! We’re now in a position where there are not only larger numbers of students supported, but all of those students are able to go through the graduate program free of tuition cost, since the Healthcare Foundation covers the majority of the tuition and USF is able to offer a discount that, together, makes this work.

How do you see the need the program is addressing?

The demand for mental health care has gone up in recent years. It was in 2021, I believe, that the Surgeon General declared the mental health crisis among youth as a major healthcare concern in the country. This was certainly exacerbated by Covid but there are ongoing social stressors and systemic issues that disproportionately impact some groups. There’s also data that shows that by 2025, 2030 there’s going to be a huge gap in mental health care, particularly for Asian Pacific Islander, African American, Latinx, and Native or Indigenous communities. This is not that surprising given the history of systemic racism in this country. There’s also plenty of research that shows that mainstream care, including mental health care, tends to pathologize problems in these communities rather than seeking to heal and humanize them. The latter is the approach we use.

Can you say more about the approach USF takes to training mental health professionals?

We came to the conclusion several years ago that if we are seeking to serve communities where there is a historical and structural gap in care, then we have to increase our own capacity to do culturally sensitive, humanizing education and mental health care — care that not only provides support but understands how systemic racism, structural inequities, impact individuals and communities in particular ways. We made a conscious decision to go from a mental health program that trains individuals for private practice, or more mainstream therapy, to a community mental health model. Many of our faculty represent the communities we are seeking to serve and have a deeper understanding of what it means to struggle with some of the stressors, along with a deeper understanding of both systemic and structural issues as well. They are also involved in research and knowledge production that is in line with our mission to advance justice in our disciplines. In this way we’re not falling into the cycle of exacerbating the harms of systemic racism in the name of health and healing. It’s a model that takes into consideration these larger social and systemic contexts.

How does the Mental Health Talent Pipeline advance this model?

The partnership with the Healthcare Foundation speaks to the type of impact we want to have with our graduate program. We have similar graduate programs in the South Bay, in Sacramento, and now in Oakland as well, in addition to San Francisco, of course. In all these locations we want programs that hold a vision, approach and design that serve the distinct needs of each of these communities. Faculty members like Daniela Domínguez in Sonoma County and Belinda Hernandez Arriaga in the South Bay live, teach, conduct research, and work within these communities, using participatory methods to build collective capacity for addressing social issues. They are not just professionals and scholars but practitioners committed to integrating and making a meaningful impact in their communities, and training future therapists in ways that align with our mission. Sonoma County is a great example: The Mental Health Talent Pipeline strengthens our ability to ensure both faculty and students are from the area, have a deeper and more authentic understanding of the context and issues impacting individuals and communities, and are committed to serving those communities as professionals. That vision has been very important to us.