The Berkeley Wellness Center, an arts-focused community space that has served people with serious mental illness since 1971, will shut its doors June 19 — a casualty of Proposition 1, the ballot measure California voters narrowly approved in 2024 to reform and expand behavioral health services.

Prop 1 redirected a significant share of state mental health dollars toward housing for people experiencing homelessness — a worthy goal that came with a hidden cost. Services deemed "non-crisis" and "discretionary" by county administrators lost their funding, and seven of eight Alameda County wellness centers are now closing. The Berkeley Wellness Center, which served roughly 300 people a year, is among them — illustrating how well-intentioned policy reform can gut the very infrastructure that keeps fragile people from cycling into crisis in the first place.

The Berkeley Wellness Center, an arts-focused community space that has served people with serious mental illness since 1971, will shut its doors June 19 — a casualty of Proposition 1, the ballot measure California voters narrowly approved in 2024 to reform and expand behavioral health services.

Prop 1 redirected a significant share of state mental health dollars toward housing for people experiencing homelessness — a worthy goal that came with a hidden cost. Services deemed "non-crisis" and "discretionary" by county bureaucrats lost their funding, and seven of eight Alameda County wellness centers are now closing. The Berkeley Wellness Center, which served roughly 300 people a year through drop-in art therapy, music groups, peer support and case management, is among them. The episode illustrates how well-intentioned policy reforms can gut the very infrastructure that keeps fragile people from cycling into crisis in the first place.

The Berkeley Wellness Center at 1909 University Avenue has operated under various names since 1971, when Adelle Lemon — a Red Cross worker in Berkeley — founded what was then called the Creative Living Center. The idea was simple: give people who'd come through psychiatric halfway houses a place to land, to play Scrabble, to make music, to be around others who understood. Lemon kept showing up herself, playing Scrabble at the center each week until her death in 2020.

That tradition ends June 19.

The center is one of seven Alameda County wellness centers closing after Proposition 1's implementation reshuffled how California distributes mental health funds, according to Berkeleyside, which first reported the closure. One center, in Hayward, will remain open.

Prop 1 passed in March 2024 by the narrowest of margins — one of the closest statewide ballot results California has seen in years — after being championed by Gov. Gavin Newsom as a comprehensive fix to the state's behavioral health crisis. The measure directed more money toward permanent supportive housing for people living on the street. That reallocation left a gap for the community programs counties had built around older funding streams.

"That meant that a lot of our more preventative, non-crisis, non-acute … and discretionary services were vulnerable," James Wagner, a deputy director with the Alameda County Behavioral Health Department, told Berkeleyside. "The wellness centers fell in the discretionary category."

Bonita House, the nonprofit that operates the Berkeley Wellness Center and the Casa Ubuntu Wellness Center in East Oakland, had already been told to expect cuts. Executive director Laura Weissberger said the county offered to extend funding for Casa Ubuntu after the Alameda County Board of Supervisors stepped in with one-time bridge money — drawing on Measure W, the county's 2020 sales tax — to restore some "discretionary" programs for the coming year. But by that point, Bonita House had already vacated its East Oakland space and surrendered the lease. The lifeline came too late.

Berkeley Wellness Center was not offered the same reprieve.

Weissberger said she is in conversations with the nonprofit Insight Housing about preserving some version of the center's services after the closure. The mobile crisis program Bonita House operates throughout Alameda County — mostly dispatched through 911 and 988 calls — did receive fully restored funding for the upcoming fiscal year, a partial relief.

What the county cannot easily replace is the drop-in model itself. Clients could walk in any weekday during operating hours, join a group, get a meal, or talk through whatever was making the week hard. Some had been coming for decades.

M. Katy Macdonald, who spent years teaching art and health at what was then called Creative Wellness Center, did not mince words. "A disgraceful situation," she wrote in an email to Berkeleyside, adding: "Many of my students are adrift." Macdonald now teaches at Berkeley Adult School, where some of her former wellness center clients have followed her.

One of them, a 60-year-old client named Scott who asked that his last name not be used, has been attending the center since the mid-2000s and still plays Scrabble on the board that once belonged to Lemon. He's been exploring senior centers in the area, but said "fitting in feels a bit iffy."

The county says it will continue offering clients case management, therapy, medication support and early intervention programs. Wagner acknowledged uncertainty about what comes next for wellness centers beyond the current fiscal year.

"Those dollars have not been identified," he said. "That will probably be a process that plays out all next fiscal year. The world can change a lot in a year."

For a community space that's survived for 55 years, that's cold comfort.