In this episode of the STAR² Center Talks Workforce Success, Emily Bennett, Behavioral Health Program Manager from the Association of Utah Community Health, shares an innovative model to meet the increased demand for behavioral health providers by partnering with local universities to support early career mental health providers to pursue work at community health centers.

Transcript by Rev.com

Sydney Axelrod:

Welcome to the STAR² Center Talks Workforce Success. I’m your host for this episode, Sydney Axelrod, Associate Director of Workforce Development at the STAR² Center at the Association of Clinicians for the Underserved, or ACU.

This season, we’re focusing on mental health professions pathways and integration into community health centers. Today, I’m talking to Emily Bennett, behavioral health program manager from the Association of Utah Community Health. Thank you so much for being here.

Emily Bennett:

Thanks for having me. I’m excited.

Sydney Axelrod:

Yeah, it’s our pleasure. So Emily, can you tell me a little bit about yourself and your background? How did you first get started in a career that supports community health centers?

Emily Bennett:

Sure. So I won’t go back all the way because I think there’s a lot that plays into why I love doing what I do, but I’ll go back to college, my undergrad. I was kind of in a place where I didn’t know entirely what I wanted to do and was very interested in a lot of different things.

And it wasn’t until I got a job at a nonprofit here in Salt Lake that was working in substance use treatment and primarily with those folks experiencing homelessness. I just loved it. They were speaking my language, and I found such an immense sense of community and purpose with that work, and that is really what led me to pursue both an undergraduate and graduate degree in social work. And then in 2018, I started with the Association for Utah Community Health, the PCA in Utah. I wasn’t entirely familiar with the health center program. I just didn’t know exactly what it was, what they did.

But the more I learned, the more I realized that the mission of the health center program just aligns so succinctly with the mission and purpose of social work in general, that I was like, “This is such a great fit for me. I get to do some macro and hands-on stuff and really see the incredible impact that health centers can have in our community and the important role that they play.” Having worked in direct services for many years and seeing the need, hands-on the need for what health centers provide, I think just really reiterated to me how important health centers are to our community.

Sydney Axelrod:

Wow. Thank you so much for sharing about that. It sounds like a really interesting journey, and it sounds like you landed right where you needed to be doing the work you care so much about in a setting that really resonates with what inspires you to do this work in the first place.

Emily Bennett:

Absolutely. Yeah.

Sydney Axelrod:

That’s so great. So in your opinion, why do you think that mental health is such an important component of these services that are provided by community health centers?

Emily Bennett:

So I think for a long time, and still to a degree, there’s been these silos of mental health and physical health, and we go to separate places, we see different people to treat different things. “Oh, that’s a mental health issue, and you need to go to a therapist or a psychologist or maybe a psychiatrist,” or, “That’s a physical health thing, and we go here for that.”

And one of the things I love about the health center program and the health centers in Utah is that that’s so integrated, that we’re able to see how one affects the other, and that the way we think about our physical health and the behaviors that we engage in impact our physical health. And it’s all just so overlapping. There’s no way to silo it because one impacts the other in so many ways.

So that’s why it’s so important that these things are addressed in these integrated settings and in integrated ways. It’s really, really important service.

Sydney Axelrod:

Yeah. Absolutely, right? Really taking care of the whole person and looking systemically at our health centers and our staff and our operations from a big-picture perspective of including both our physical health providers as well as our mental health providers.

Emily Bennett:

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Sydney Axelrod:

That’s great. So can you share a little bit about some of the pathway programs that you’ve developed at the Association of Utah Community Health that really support the expansion and recruitment and retention of the mental health workforce?

Emily Bennett:

I’ll speak for my tenure at AUCH, the Association for Utah Community Health. I’ll call it AUCH from now on. So this has really been on our mind, I think ever since I started, and I’ve seen this immense need and this desire to grow behavioral health services within our health centers, and so it’s been on my mind. Since I started in 2018, I think it’s been something that’s been on my radar.

And then we really started noticing the challenges with recruitment back in, let’s see, 2021, 2022. I think we were in a difficult time, and there was an increased demand for behavioral health providers. The health centers in Utah were experiencing this huge challenge with recruiting providers to meet the demand that they were seeing. And so really in late 2023, early 2024, my colleague and I started talking about how can we help with this problem?

And we both have backgrounds in social work, and we were like, “What’s going on? How can we help?” We started having discussions around why we chose this work and why it was important to us, that mission alignment with the health center program and social work. In having these conversations, we started to talk through why we chose nonprofit work early in our career and the important role that our practicum experiences in our undergrad and graduate degrees played in choosing that direction. And so we started thinking about how can we get people into health centers early in their career, and then they’re more likely to hopefully to kind of grow this passion for nonprofit work just that really aligns with that social work mission?

In having these conversations, we then went to the health centers. We talked about would they be interested in having maybe students be placed with them? What has that looked like in the past? And some were doing it and many were not. And one of the big challenges that we found health centers were facing was around paying students to have them placed with them, which is obviously really important.

And I’ll say having gone through grad school 10 years ago, a placement where you weren’t paid was very common. That was kind of the standard, the norm. But these days, that’s not as common, and it’s hard to incentivize students to be placed with you when you don’t have that.

We saw that as a real barrier to getting these students placed, so we had received a grant from the Cambia Foundation, and we had some funding remaining in that grant, and so we decided to put it toward this program that we would incentivize students to be placed at health centers for their master’s, their MSW practicum. They’d receive this $10,000 stipend for their time, and we wanted it to really benefit them. It’s such a great experience to be placed at a health center.

We were able to create this opportunity for students. We reached out to two universities, Utah State University and the University of Utah, and we were able to fairly quickly get 10 students placed at health centers in Utah. That was starting in August 2024. They just finished up in April 2025. We were able to provide some supplemental continuing education for them about integrated behavioral health and the health center program and talk about how to kind of sustain their career in the helping profession in general because it’s challenging work. And I think that was an added bonus for them too, that we were able to give them this kind of additional education.

But it turned out really, really amazing. We were really happy to be able to offer this program, and there have been a couple of those placements that are staying on at health centers, so we’re really happy about that. And hopefully they can leave and tell their fellow social workers and in their future what a great experience they had working in community health during their graduate program.

So we are continuing this program into this coming fall. We’re currently in the process of recruiting additional students to be placed at health centers starting in fall 2025. It’s been a really awesome experience and a success. We’ve gotten incredibly positive feedback from both health centers and the students about their experiences.

Sydney Axelrod:

Wow. Congratulations on the success of the pilot of this program. It sounds like it’s really incredible. And what an interesting way to think about supporting early career professionals, to really have that experience you had of falling in love with the community health center world.

And it sounds like the program’s really speaking for itself that folks are staying on and wanting to continue this work in this settings, and I think it’s just so impressive to think about the way that you all have thought about it with removing barriers to being able to do that work and also providing additional sort of supports, it sounds like, to make it an easier choice for them to be able to go into work at a community health center and potentially stay there for the longterm.

Emily Bennett:

Absolutely. I’ll just speak to one more thing that I noticed that I think it’s a challenge for the social work field in general is what we see happening around these practicum placements is so often students are getting placed in private practice, which I have no qualms about private practice. It’s an important access point for many people to receive behavioral health services.

And because these private practices can pay students, it is creating some challenges on the nonprofit side for social workers to enter at that point too. And so becoming competitive and incentivizing students to enter into the nonprofit arena as well, I think is really, really important to address.

Sydney Axelrod:

Absolutely. And it sounds like your program really is starting to figure that out, right? How to crack that nut, so to speak, of getting folks engaged in this space?

Emily Bennett:

I hope so.

Sydney Axelrod:

Yeah. So let me ask you this. So through programs like this and opportunities like this that we sort of have the chance to introduce people to doing this type of work and really get them sort of in the door of the community health center world, what are some strategies that you think health centers can use to really support that mental health workforce once they’re there and ensure that they really feel like an integrated part of the overall organization?

Emily Bennett:

There are obviously formalized approaches to behavioral health integration, the collaborative care management model, primary care behavioral health model, and others, I’m sure. And these are really helpful guides, I think, to how to practice with behavioral health and physical health under the same roof.

And I think it’s more than that. I don’t like when people get caught up in, “Oh, are we practicing in this specific model or that specific model?” It’s important because there are some billing and reimbursement pieces with certain models. However, it’s going to look different everywhere, the actual practice of integrated care.

And so I think the most important piece is creating a culture within the organization that really values both physical health and mental health and understands and appreciates how they connect, that there isn’t this overvaluation on physical health because it’s more likely reimbursable, those services, right? There’s more funding that comes in on that side. So I think that can happen, and so you have to make an intentional effort to value both sides of that coin.

And that starts within the culture of the organization, that they see them both as providers, that they are providing an integral service to the patients that they work with, and treating them in similar ways, and that their voices are being heard at every table in leadership and in organizational choices that are being made. That there is value for both sides, I think, is really important.

And I’ll speak to my experiences. When I stayed in an organization, it’s so often because I feel that value and I feel that mentorship, I feel invested in. And so I think those all continue to be key for most people to stick around and to stay and be supported.

Sydney Axelrod:

Absolutely. Thank you so much for that. I think you lift up some really important points here that there’s a lot of factors to consider when we’re thinking about the overall sort of operations and staff at a health center and thinking about things like the policies and procedures and even things like billing structures, right? But then also thinking about the less formal things like the organizational norms and the individualized support that we’re offering to our providers and especially to our mental health providers. So I think there’s a lot of really great insights in there, so thank you so much for sharing that.

I’m curious, do you have any recommendations just generally for health centers who are kind of struggling to recruit and retain and train this next generation of mental health providers and staff? You built out such a wonderful program. I know you mentioned you had some supplemental funding available to do that, and obviously we know not everyone’s going to have access to that. Not everyone has a brilliant Emily Bennett on their staff to help support a program like this. So any just sort of general recommendations that you might have for health centers?

Emily Bennett:

I would say the biggest thing I can recommend is to connect with your local university. I think that has been instrumental in our program being successful is making those connections. So with my background in social work, and I did my undergraduate program at the University of Utah, I got on the Practicum Advisory Council, and that really helped maintain and fully integrate these kind of connections that we have with the University of Utah. I feel like I can reach out to them pretty easily, and they know my name, they know who I am, and so I think that’s been incredibly helpful.

Similarly, with Utah State, we have met in person when we can, do Zoom calls. Just maintaining those connections is really, really important so that they know who we are and how we can support their program. And I think that what we see too at the university level is they also value this kind of non-profit experience for students too, especially on the social work side. That’s part of our mission, and so we all kind of have this foundation where we see the importance of that work for students, that experience for them. I think getting those connections is a really important piece.

When it comes to training, this is an ongoing effort to have integrated behavioral health become more a part of training in master’s behavioral health programs. There are some out there and different certifications that folks can get, but I think that there is not a lot of information that like, “Oh, I can go this route and do this kind of work,” and what that would look like and what the kind of skills are that are important for that.

So again, the connections with the university can help kind of get them thinking about that. Or just interest in putting new hires through certification programs in integrated behavioral health, I think, would help them feel competent and confident that they’re able to do the work in the primary care setting.

And retaining folks, again, organizational culture is huge. Like I mentioned, for me, that’s been a huge, huge part of why I’ve stayed with organizations is when I feel that supportive culture.

Sydney Axelrod:

That’s great. Thank you so much for sharing. A lot of really great sort of tips and ideas in there. And just a few that I heard you mention, I think that the emphasis on not only building new partnerships, but also investing in sustaining those relationships over time, I think is such an important piece of this, to have that sort of evergreen source of new hires and new trainees when we really invest in building those relationships over the long term.

I think that’s a really important piece of, especially the success of programs like the ones that you have created, right? And really partnering strategically with other organizations that have that level of mission alignment that you were talking about, I think, is a really smart approach to this.

So any other tools, resources, or final thoughts that you’d like to share with our audience about some effective ways to train and integrate mental health workforce into your community health centers?

Emily Bennett:

So the last piece that I will mention that I think can be a real challenge when you are working with students and growing that kind of pathway is the supervision piece. Creating that kind of learning environment and having a culture of learning, it can feel like that can take away from the day to day.

And it does. It is time that people need and that you have to set aside for mental health providers to teach and grow these students. So keeping that in mind, building that into the schedule of whoever you’re going to designate as the supervisor for these students is really important.

It can’t just be an added thing in addition to all of the other things they’re already doing because that’s going to be a really difficult and challenging expectation for that provider, and it’s not going to be a super great experience for those students either. They’re not maybe going to want to stick around, and they might not speak so highly of their experience, and that’s not what we want.

Making that a priority is really important. Ensuring that they have those supervisory skills, the supervisory training to be effective with these students is really, really important. The schools, the universities, typically have a training that they have to go through that’s usually not too long.

I would say additional training is also really beneficial for a clinical supervisor. I do some of that myself, and it can be really challenging at times, so having that training is really important.

Sydney Axelrod:

Thank you for that. I think you lifted up such an important piece of this puzzle, right? And that supervisor relationship and investing properly in the training of our supervisors and supporting our supervisors to be able to show up in an effective way for our trainees and for the new staff. I think that’s so important. Awesome.

Well, Emily, thank you so much for joining us today, and listeners, thank you for tuning in. We hope that today’s conversation provided you with ideas, suggestions, and insights into ways that you can approach mental health professions pathways and integration into your community health centers.

Be sure to check out all of our free workforce tools and resources found at CHCworkforce.org, and check out all that AUCH, or the Association of Utah Community Health, is doing at www.AUCH.org. Thank you again, and have a wonderful rest of your day.