NEWS | PRESS

Pasadena Agency Partners with UCLA and Wins Award

April 23, 2008 — A team of professionals from Pasadena-based Hathaway-Sycamores Child and Family Services and Dr. Joan Asarnow, a UCLA professor of psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences, were among five partnerships honored with the 2008 Ann C. Rosenfield Distinguished Community Partnership Prize at UCLA on April 22. Hosted by UCLA's Center for Community Partnerships, the Rosenfield Prize ceremony, which was held at the UCLA Broad Art Center on the UCLA campus, recognizes innovative collaborations between UCLA faculty and regional nonprofits aimed at addressing critical issues  affecting the community. This year's honorees have focused on issues involving the teen suicide prevention, environment, health care, and theater. Each partnership will receive a $25,000 award.   

"The work of our UCLA prize winners is significant, not only for the impact it will have on the individuals and families served by their innovative partnerships, but also because it symbolizes the greatness that can occur when UCLA scholars are engaged in the community," said Franklin D. Gilliam Jr., UCLA associate vice chancellor for community partnerships. "UCLA is proud to be a leader in the national movement toward engaged scholarship."   

Asarnow and Hathaway-Sycamores, a Pasadena-based agency serving more than 9,000 at-risk youth and families, partnered to help prevent teen suicide. After an agency-wide survey revealed that approximately one in three clients struggled with suicidal thoughts, one in five had deliberately harmed themselves and one in 10 had attempted suicide, Asarnow, along with Hathaway-Sycamores director of evaluation and research Emily McGrath, of South Pasadena, and a team of agency and academic experts, conducted a training program for agency staff on the best methods for intervening with and improve care for youth struggling with suicidal tendencies. Asarnow, whose team independently developed a suicide prevention program, organized a community forum, created a newsletter, and made presentations at local and national meetings, hopes to implement the program (for which they solicited feedback from Hathaway-Sycamores), at Hathaway-Sycamores and other community nonprofit organizations dealing with youth suicide and suicide prevention.   

The Rosenfield Prize program is supported by the UCLA Foundation Ann C. Rosenfield Fund under the direction of UCLA alumnus David A. Leveton.