February 14, 2011 Today, state and local officials attended a ribbon cutting ceremony for the official grand opening of Mahalia Jackson Center in New Orleans, Louisiana’s first urban Neighborhood Place. Neighborhood Place provides critical services to community residents in a new way. Through Neighborhood Place, Department of Children & Family Services (DCFS), the state departments of Health and Hospitals (DHH), Education (DoE), the Louisiana Workforce Commission (LWC) and the Office of Juvenile Justice (OJJ) work as a team with local providers to offer better, more accessible services to clients because they are located under one roof.
Notable figures who spoke at the ceremony included: Pat Coober, Mahalia Jackson Center CEO; Ruth Jackson, DCFS Secretary of Children’s Services; Jay Augustine, LA Workforce Commission; Phyllis Landrieu, co-founder of the Center; Audrey Browder, Early Childhood & Family Learning Foundation; Lourdes Moran, Orleans Parish Schoolboard; and Lakeysha London, Principle of the school.
In 2008, Governor Bobby Jindal signed Act 775 creating Neighborhood Place. Before this Act was signed, families had to travel to several locations just to apply for services they needed. State agencies were unable to coordinate and plan in order to meet their clients’ needs, and this process was lengthy and inefficient.
Neighborhood Place was designed to be a community-led effort to bring a new kind of convenience to services by merging education, health, workforce development and other key social services. A main goal of Neighborhood Place is to provide customer-friendly services that focus on the critical areas of student achievement, health care, social services, workforce and juvenile justice services.
For more information:
Department of Children & Family Services
Mahalia Jackson Center
Neighborhood Place
