Palo Alto University held a grand opening Thursday morning for its new Mountain View campus, the Gronowski Center Community Clinic, which houses classrooms and faculty and administrative offices and will serve as a hub for community workshops and events.
PAU is a private university that provides undergraduate and graduate-level education in psychology and counseling. Each year the school graduates approximately 100 clinical psychologists and 150 mental health counselors.
PAU administrators have been seeking a new location to house their remote services since before the pandemic. The new Mountain View campus, located at 1172 Castro St., away from the main campus on Arastradero Road in Palo Alto, is essential to university operations, serving as a more accessible site for students, faculty and clientele. The Gronowski Center was previously in Los Altos before the land was developed for new housing.
PAU president Maureen O’Connor saw the transition as the ideal opportunity for re-evaluating what the university needs in a new space.
The new Gronowski Center has an assembly room for events, classrooms, offices, clinical spaces and teletherapy rooms. The building is close to transit and other amenities in downtown Mountain View. Location accessibility for staff, students and clientele was key to administrators’ consideration of a new campus location, enabling PAU’s training clinics to meet the diverse mental health needs of residents of Santa Clara and San Mateo counties.
“We’re very excited,” O’Connor said. “I think there’s something about our physical environment and location that can really help generate all kinds of new ideas.”
Administrators chose the location with the intent to facilitate closer collaboration with community partners based in Mountain View, including the Community Health Awareness Council, LifeMoves and other agencies, hospitals, schools and organizations.
“As we all know, there is an enormous need for affordable mental health services and well-trained mental health professionals,” Mountain View Mayor Lucas Ramirez said. “Palo Alto University brings both to our community, improving the quality of life for all residents.”
The grand-opening event featured a host of community leaders, including several Mountain View City Council members, and a keynote address by Joe Farrow, president of the board of the National Alliance of Mental Illness California chapter, who spoke of the urgent need for equitable access to health care.
“Through these doors over the next few decades will walk the practitioners who will be the change agents,” Farrow said. “We have here today a very nice facility surrounded with people who really care, with the greatest of hearts and the greatest of concern.”
The Gronowski Center includes two specialty clinics. The Sexual and Gender Identities Clinic offers psychotherapy services for LGBTQ individuals, and La Clinica Latina provides bicultural psychological services for Spanish-speaking people. In addition, an E-Clinic serves clientele via teletherapy. The Gronowski Center offers sliding-scale in-person and virtual services for adults, couples and children. Services are provided by doctoral-level student therapists supervised by licensed clinical psychologists.
Despite the facility’s debut last week, operations at the new Gronowski Center won’t commence in full until the new year, as administrators thought it would be too disruptive to switch students to a new campus in the middle of a term.
For more information on Palo Alto University, visit paloaltou.edu.
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