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Ellis Wright-Dunbar Neighborhood Plan

Presented by Larry C. James, Ph.D., ABPP 

Wright State University’s School of Professional Psychology

1st Annual Black Tie Gala on October 16, 2009  

Schuster Performing Arts Center, Wintergarden in Dayton, Ohio

I would like to offer my vision for a partnership with the School of Professional Psychology, the Wright-Dunbar Community and the Ayers Foundation.

In 2008, Dr. David Hopkins delivered, and the Board of Trustees approved, five goals as the fulcrum in a strategic plan for Wright State University. One goal, transformational learning, stands as a guiding light for society’s needs today, especially in a struggling economic environment. The university community has taken a leadership role to become a catalyst for local economic recovery by understanding and implementing the pivotal aspects of the transformational learning process. In preparing students to graduate into the work force with hands-on experience through community-university partnerships, Wright State is doing more than just assisting communities in Dayton, Ohio, and throughout the Miami Valley. It’s providing caring graduates who will go forth and bring prominence to the region. The university is a living example of collaborative spirit.

In the middle of Wright State University is the Award winning School of Professional Psychology, better known as the SOPP. The School of Professional Psychology graduates more doctoral level clinical psychologists each year than any university in the state of Ohio. Among Ohio’s highest achieving units for doctoral studies, the School of Professional Psychology (SOPP) is considered a leading program nationwide. In a 2004 speech, Dr. Donald Peterson, former dean of the Rutgers University Graduate School of Professional Psychology hailed the SOPP as “one of America’s top three doctor of psychology schools.”

At the Duke E. Ellis Institute, the SOPP’s teaching community-based teaching facility and clinic, which is located in downtown Dayton on West Third Street, faculty and students go about the business of helping others throughout the year. For example, the Ellis Institute’s Assessment Clinic (ASC) worked with 208 new cases in 2008 while the General Practice Clinic handled 170 new cases in 2008. Second- , third- , and fourth-year graduate students, under supervision, evaluate a segment of the population that is often ignored, the underserved and impoverished. The SOPP’s innovative community programs include Parents Early Childhood Education/Positive Action Choices Training; the Mental Health & Deafness treatment program; Preventing Abuse in the Home; the Community Memory Clinic, among several others.

In its 30 years’ existence, the SOPP has graduated 642 students. Our graduates are in all parts of the world, from Ohio, to Hawaii to Europe and all the way to India.

A hallmark of Wright State’s Strategic Plan is the concept of Transformation. In other words, we believe that we should use the richness and expertise of the University to help transform the community through economic development, innovation and creativity. The Wright State School of Professional Psychology (SOPP) has conceptualized a vision to transform the community that borders the Duke Ellis Institute. Located in the heart of Dayton and the historic Wright-Dunbar District, the Institute was designed to be the “gateway” to this community and provide the urban community of Dayton with effective, innovative, and cost-effective mental health services as well as conduct state-of-the art community-based research. Many academic and clinical programs at the Ellis Institute have received national acclaim and awards for innovation. With the success of the Duke Ellis Institute has come increased expertise and national recognition for our faculty and students. Their combined work led to the SOPP being named in 2007 as the Suinn Minority Achievement Award recipient, presented at the American Psychology Association annual conference. The school had received honorable mention for the award in earlier years.

As our faculty, students and staff have transformed the lives of thousands of patients and citizens over the 20 years’ existence of the Ellis Institute, the time now has come to transform the community surrounding the Institute as Dr. Ellis himself had envisioned. As the economy has seen a downturn across our nation, so has the Wright-Dunbar District of downtown Dayton. Homes have been lost, businesses have seen better days, and many properties surrounding the Ellis Institute have been foreclosed.

With the Guidance, vision and support of Dr David Hopkins, the University President, Dr Steve Angle, the WSU Provost, Dr Bryan Rowland, President of the WSU Foundation, Mayor McLin, City Commissioner Dean Lovelace, Ohio State Representative Roland Winburn, Ms. Bootsie Neal, and my colleagues at the university such as Jacci McMillan, Associate Provost for Enrollment Management, Dr Lilly Howard, Senior Vice President for Curriculum & Instruction, Deans Pat Martin and Chuck Taylor of the College of Nursing and College of Liberal Arts respectively, the School of Professional Psychology has written The Duke E. Ellis Institute and Wright-Dunbar Neighborhood Plan. It is our vision that the Duke Ellis Institute will serve to transform and rehabilitate the community where it is located. We will be utilizing the expertise, energy, and richness of the School of Professional Psychology and the Wright State University Community to create a rebirth for the Wright-Dunbar District community.

As we expand our resources, teaching, and community clinical services, we have a goal to rehabilitate and remodel 11 to 15 abandoned buildings and properties and through a partnership with the Wright-Dunbar, Inc we plan to lease three properties that border the Ellis Institute, transforming them into bustling houses of creativity, innovation and services for the community.

The Ellis Wright-Dunbar Neighborhood Plan has four primary goals: 

• Develop the Wright-Dunbar district as a center for healthy lifestyle research, teaching, and the development of creative clinical practices. We will use innovative and cutting edge research to curb the tide of childhood obesity, type II Diabetes and hypertension in the community by drawing upon the expertise of the SOPP faculty. 

• Each house or center will spur job creation and growth; it is believed that the project in its entirety will create 50 to 100 jobs for new faculty, researchers, teachers, and very importantly graduate student assistantships.  Not only will our plan create jobs, but it will build upon the residential growth of the community by encouraging SOPP faculty, staff and its students to reside in the community it serves. 

• Deliver needed cutting edge services coupled with state-of-the art behavioral science research. For example, our nationally renowned Neuropsychologist, Dr Jeff Allen will pioneer research in the assessment and treatment of Alzheimer’s disease and Dementia. Under the leadership of Dr Janeece Warfield, an award winning Child Psychologist, we will expand programs that support healthy children and healthy families. 

• Lastly, but perhaps most importantly, build upon the Wright Brothers and Paul Lawrence pioneering spirit; help to return the Wright-Dunbar community as the center of innovation and creativity.

Time will not allow me to go into detail about each specific house that will be rehabilitated into an innovative center, but I would like to take this opportunity to highlight the collaboration of the SOPP, Wright State University’s College of Liberal Arts, Nursing, Medicine, Education, the Wright-Dunbar Community, Inc. and the Nathaniel Anthony Ayers Foundation.  

A few months ago, with the assistance and guidance of Jacci McMillan, the Associate Provost for Enrollment Management, a partnership was formed between the SOPP and the Nathaniel Anthony Ayers Foundation.  In August of this year, Through Jacci McMillan, I had the honor and pleasure of meeting Jennifer Ayers and her husband, Jerry, of the Ayers Foundation.

They are here with us tonight; would all of you please stand and be recognized.

Let me tell you the significance of this partnership.

More than three decades ago, one of Julliard School’s most gifted musical students, Nathaniel Anthony Ayers, dropped out of the renowned performing arts conservatory and embarked upon an odyssey to Los Angeles, where he hoped to locate his estranged father. Nathaniel left Julliard because he was suffering from a severe mental illness, schizophrenia. He dropped out of school, became overwhelmed by all the problems that go hand and hand with this disease, disappeared from society and lived on the streets of Los Angeles.

That man, Nathaniel Anthony Ayers, spent his days playing music on the streets of Los Angeles. However, through care and treatment, he is not a forgotten person with schizophrenia thanks to an extraordinary event in his life. Although homeless, Nathaniel was noticed one day as he skillfully played a tattered violin containing just two of its four bowed strings. That discovery, along with the realization that Nathaniel sleeps each night on one of skid row’s most dangerous streets, was made by Los Angeles Times columnist Steve Lopez, who over time befriended Nathaniel.

Steve Lopez chronicled the life of Nathaniel Anthony Ayers, a Cleveland, Ohio, native with ties to Wright State University, first in award-winning Times newspaper accounts and later in a bestselling book entitled The Soloist: A Lost Dream, an Unlikely Friendship, and the Redemptive Power of Music. Today, the book has been transformed into a major motion picture from Paramount entitled The Soloist and features Jamie Foxx as Nathaniel and Robert Downey Jr. as Lopez.

Perhaps faith, synchronicity, good luck or divine providence has led to the path of the School of Professional Psychology intersecting with the Path of the Nathaniel Anthony Ayers. The School of Professional Psychology has partnered with the Ayers Foundation and we have been asked to pioneer the development of “Nathaniel’s Place.”

A new, cutting-edge, behavioral health clinic for the community, Nathaniel’s Place, will integrate the arts, music, journalism, and clinical psychology as rehabilitative therapy for mentally ill residents of our community. But there is more ladies and gentlemen. With the collaboration of our Boonshoft School of Medicine we have the science and technology to conduct function Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) brain mapping to determine exactly what happens in the brain of a depressed child while he or she is playing the violin, drawing or writing poetry; just amazing. And, we have been asked by the Ayers foundation to pioneer this right here at Wright State and the Wright-Dunbar Community.

Nathaniel’s Place will be our first clinic, and its anticipated success is expected to be replicated in other cities around the country. We will lease a beautiful historic building from Bootsie Neal’s Wright-Dunbar, Inc and Nathaniel’s Place will be located just down the street from the Duke Ellis Institute on West Third Street in downtown, Dayton, Ohio. My students and faculty are already excited about Nathaniel’s Place because it will not only be a center of creativity and innovation, it will provide 5 to 10 scholarships for our students and spearhead cutting edge research.

With financial support from you and the community, the first Nathaniel’s Place will open in the historic Wright-Dunbar neighborhood in Dayton two blocks from where the Ellis Institute has operated for 20 years. Fully renovating a Wright-Dunbar property into a thriving treatment clinic for families touched by emotional problems will give hope to underserved families that their loved ones can receive professional treatment and be a productive member of the community once again.  

Like the bold men our University was named after, we will be innovative and creative in meeting the healthcare needs of the community. Nathaniel’s Place, like other properties in Wright State’s Transformative Impact plan, will meet an unmet behavioral health, medical, and economic community need within the Dayton, Ohio, metropolitan area and beyond.

I want to sincerely thank you for your time this evening. Needless to say, I will have a very busy fall season. I sense your excitement about the School of Professional Psychology and its collaboration with the Ayers Foundation and the Wright-Dunbar Community and how these partnerships will create scholarships for our students, stimulate economic development for the community, and continue to build upon the creative Wright Brothers spirit. The goals of this community plan parallels, and mirrors, the creative vision and strategic plan of Wright State's President, Dr. David Hopkins. This project will do exactly what Dr. Hopkins has charged all of at Wright State University to do—position Wright State University as a catalyst for innovation, creativity and growth in our community.

I will be contacting each of you to ask for your support and assistance in making a contribution to this vision. Moreover, I am interested in building a long term relationship and partnership with each of you so that you can be a part of the of the Wright Brothers pioneering spirit and help us realize the reality of the vision and goals I have described for you tonight.

Thank you so much for your support this evening and I look forward to a long and wonderful relationship with each of you.

Larry C. James, Ph.D., ABPP

Dean and Professor

School of Professional Psychology

Wright State University