NORFOLK, Va. (WAVY) — The Norfolk Redevelopment and Housing Authority (NRHA) is working with local counselors to make sure families have someone to talk to during the end of the year.

“We started Renaissance Counseling Services over ten years ago,” said LaSonya Green, President of Renaissance Counseling Services. “We partner with NRHA in 2022. We started off with a summer youth program providing services to the clients in Calvert Square. We started off talking about anger management and conflict resolution. Along with the partnership, we collaborated and started different programs. From there we started working together and formulating out a partnership which NRHA has provided excellent services to the clients and the community!”

Renaissance Counseling Services provides an array of services — starting from intensive in-home, to working with children (adolescents) and families.

“We are all very much aware that the holidays can be a source of joy and celebration for a lot of our families. However, it is also a time for many challenges because of the pressures of gift giving, personal grief, sadness because of separation of family members due to distance or maybe just not good connections, overall,” said Michele Maldonado, the clinical supervisor with Renaissance Counseling Services LCSW.

Maldonado adds, “from a mental health perspective, we can provide support, guidance and be really hands on in the moment. Tips of how to manage holiday expectations, how to provide self-care for yourself and for your family, and just overall helping them really quickly figure out interventions, for an example, helping them prepare a plan on how to cope with the anticipated stressors that come along with the holiday.”

The partnership recently hosted a Christmas event where they built gingerbread houses with kids and talked about ways to cope with the holidays.

“This opportunity is just a gem. Because if you think about social determinants of health, we are looking at what are the barriers to access to appropriate care and this opportunity is allowing us not to have the barrier of where are the population that need us the most,” said Maldonado. “We look like you, we talk like you. We even offer a bilingual clinician services, so we can speak to an array of folks with various socioeconomic issues and ongoing needs.”

Renaissance Counseling Services is located at 110 Maycox Avenue in Norfolk. Health professionals provides assistance to residents in Calvert Square and Young Terrance.

“We go twice a week,” said Green, who obtained her Master of Social Work. “We work at the Calvert Square Family Investment Center, we’re not only going into the center (we’re housed at the center), we also go into the homes as well. We go to the Norfolk Public Schools. We provide services to children and families in their homes as well as we provide substance abuse groups,” said Green.

Green is a native of Hampton Roads, who watched her mother give back to the community growing up.

“It’s very important because it serves it serves the community. It keeps us together, it’s the collaboration that allows us to provide additional mental health and support services. The families actually feel comfortable, working with someone who they can relate to. We start where they are,” said Green. “We start where they are, and they find me as well as my staff very relatable for someone who they feel comfortable talking to day in and day out and also providing crisis services. We go and find out what they need. Some families may need a loaf of bread. Some may need just someone to talk to. We start actually where the clients are.”

Julius Norman, Norfolk Redevelopment and Housing Authority Director of Client Services, said this partnership has the potential to help communities “be able to thrive!”

“It was very important to us to provide access to mental health in our communities because of the different things that was happening in our community,” said Norman. “It was important that we made sure that we have access to mental health in our communities where it was accessible and by providing mental health providers and not just Calvert Square and Young Terrace, but in all our different communities.”

The partnership with Renaissance Counseling creates a safe space for families and residents to seek resources.

“Having the mental health providers in all of our different communities, it fosters that ability that they have a sense of safety, they have a place where they can actually go and feel as though they can express themselves in a natural way,” Norman said.

Norman concludes, “Mental health is number one, if we can get our residents healthy, we can create healthy and safe communities.”