Violence Intervention Program celebrates new building

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A dozen vivid paintings of flowers, saxophones and birds line the baby-blue back wall of the Keck Medical Center of USC's newest clinic. They're all at least three feet long and lit in recess, and the high, drafty ceiling and glass doors ring with jazz music and friendly conversation. It almost looks like an art gallery.

Instead, this is the lobby of the new site of the Los Angeles County - USC Medical Center's Violence Intervention Program, a clinic for child victims of sexual and physical abuse.

"It's hard to explain it to people who were never here before," said Dr. Astrid Heger, who founded the clinic in 1995 and has overseen its evolution ever since. "This was just so ugly. I couldn't stand the fact that we had no place at this hospital that had grass."

The Violence Intervention Program serves more than 20 thousand foster children, and any other victims, regardless of their ability to pay.

A year ago, however, it treated them from a windowless block surrounded by asphalt. Now, founder of women's empowerment nonprofit Do A Little Deborah Santana believes the clinic is much more welcoming - beautiful, even.

"The artwork speaks for itself," Santana said. "It's from the community. This type of brilliant art is on these walls to bless everybody who comes in, because art heals, just as medicine heals."

The paintings come from Avenue 50 Studio in Highland Park. J. Michael Walker, a founding board member of the Studio, also painted two of the pieces hanging in the clinic.

"I think what's important is that the artists be able to speak a language that communicates well to the audience. Whether they're born in the same community, whether they live in the same geographic community or not, the important thing is that there's a common language," Walker said. "Everybody has a love of art. What's missing is access to art."

Heger directed the installation of a park with picnic tables outside the clinic several years ago. The renovated building that opened today will start serving its patients in mid-May. And now, she's working with Doctor Larry Opas to turn it into something much, much bigger - what Opas calls a "medical village" able to treat patients from childhood until old age.

"That's a very important concept in medicine right now, that every patient should have a medical home," Opas said. "I have no problem with the medical home. But it was Astrid who said, you know, in my business, a home is not always the safest place... We want to create a medical village."

That vision is still a dream.

But Heger turned her visionary clinic into today's new building in just a year of donor-funded construction. Opas is confident that their latest goal will soon become reality, too.

Tags: Rosalie Murphy, LAC-USC Medical Center, Violence Intervention Program, community arts, visual arts, child abuse, sexual abuse, domestic violence, health, medicine