WINTER PARK, Fla. – It’s not always easy to talk about mental health.
But the Winter Park Health Foundation’s CHILL program has been doing it for nearly three decades.
In the early 90s, the original Winter Park Memorial Hospital was sold.
By law, a foundation was set up with an endowment from a portion of the proceeds from that sale.
The Winter Park Health Foundation’s mission is to serve the communities of Winter Park, Maitland and Eatonville.
Julie Broughton took a visit to the The Center for Health & Wellness in Winter Park, which was opened in 2019 by the foundation.
She found that 30 years later, one of their core programs is still getting results.
The Chill Counseling Program (Community Help and Intervention in Life’s lessons) is a school-based counseling program for students in 6th through 12th grade who need help with issues such as divorce, grief and loss, low self-esteem, anger management and depression.
CHILL Counseling Program counselors focus on prevention and early intervention programs. There is no cost to students or families. The program is available in 13 OCPS schools.
Deb Watson, executive vice president of the Winter Park Health Foundation, said about 200 students participated in the program last year.
“The way that we know that this is working is not only the anecdotal responses that we get from the administrators, the parents, the testimonials and all of that, but every student is assessed before they come into the CHILL program, and there are different types of scales depending upon the issue that they’re being seen for,” Watson said. “And then, at the end of their participation in the counseling program, when they graduate from the counseling sessions, we’re able to see how they score on those assessments. And so we’re able to see the improvement that comes as a result.”
Since 1994, the Winter Park Health Foundation has donated $131.5 million in projects that help their nonprofit partners.
The nonprofit also funds school nursing services, school-based health centers and healthy school teams that have inspired similar programs in other OCPS schools.
“The good news is that as a result of the impact that we’ve had, Orange County Public Schools has been able to draw down funds from a variety of different sources to be able to put a dedicated school counselor in every elementary school,” Watson said. “So every school in Orange County, every elementary school in Orange County, has a dedicated school counselor. That’s why we’re focusing, primarily now, in the secondary schools in our area.”