photo by: Courtesy of DCCCA

DCCCA broke ground on its new building recently in eastern Lawrence. The building will bring nearly all of DCCCA's services under one roof, and construction is planned to finish in early 2024.

If everything goes to plan, a new DCCCA building providing various social services in Lawrence could be finished just in time to celebrate the agency’s 50th anniversary.

“If we actually open in 2024, it’s 50 years to the year,” DCCCA CEO Lori Alvarado told the Journal-World. “DCCCA started in a one-room office in downtown Lawrence in 1974.”

DCCCA broke ground on a new facility last week — a $7 million, 17,000-square-foot building that the nonprofit filed plans for in March. The building is set to be constructed adjacent to the agency’s current outpatient location at 1739 E. 23rd St. in eastern Lawrence, and Alvarado said it should be complete by the first half of 2024 at the latest.

The facility will house a variety of DCCCA programs, including services related to family preservation, substance-abuse prevention, traffic safety, foster parenting and adoption, and behavioral health outpatient needs. Nearly the entire array of the agency’s services will be under the same roof in Lawrence for the first time, Alvarado said.

photo by: Austin Hornbostel/Journal-World

A rendering on display at DCCCA’s administrative office at 3312 Clinton Parkway shows what the future DCCCA building will look like.

It’s not yet clear what will happen to the current outpatient building space, but the plans filed with the City of Lawrence earlier this year called for it to be demolished. Alvarado told the Journal-World in an email that “The board of directors has not made a decision about what will happen with the current building” and said the organization wanted to “concentrate our attention on ensuring that the new space progresses and meets needs.”

Alvarado said the nonprofit’s leaders have been considering the new space for around five years and, if not for the COVID-19 pandemic, probably would already have constructed it by now.

“Those services have grown,” Alvarado said. “Obviously, there’s a huge need for substance abuse treatment — just huge — with the onslaught of post-COVID challenges. If you read news articles, you know that overdose around issues with opioids and fentanyl are rising regularly, so all of those needs have really increased the services that are needed in the community.”

The same goes for the agency’s other services; the number of foster parents needed in the area has increased in the past five to 10 years, Alvarado said, and prevention services have expanded statewide recently as well.

DCCCA has been working from its current outpatient location on 23rd Street since 2000. The site was previously India Elementary School, which closed decades ago. It’s an aging building, Alvarado said, and not configured well for the work the agency does.

On top of that, agency staff is scattered elsewhere at a leased space in Lawrence.

“We’re excited to serve clients in a much more suitable location,” Alvarado said. “We’re excited to integrate our services more effectively for client outcomes, and I think we’re excited to provide a location on the east side of town that … shows growth.”

There’s also a hope that at least part of the new space will be something community members can make use of, too. Alvarado noted that the building would have a 50-person conference room that DCCCA plans to make available to the public when possible.

There’s even an existing model for how the DCCCA Services Building might operate. In Wichita, DCCCA has a 63,000-square-foot facility that houses all of the agency’s services under one roof in a similar fashion. For the past two years, Alvarado said nonprofit leaders have been able to examine that integrated service model and see what works.

“We found that our outcomes can be enhanced, we found our clients were served better, we found that our staff are more informed about everything that we provide because you’re not working in a silo or anything,” Alvarado said. “So we have a model in Wichita where we have a microcosm of all the services we provide, and we will have that here.”

The only service provided in Wichita that won’t be mirrored at the new Lawrence facility will be DCCCA’s residential treatment program — a women’s program known as First Step at Lake View — which will stay put in its current location at 3015 W. 31st St.

With another community behavioral health resource, the Treatment and Recovery Center of Douglas County, soon opening its own brand-new building, Alvarado said Douglas County was uniquely positioned to be a leader in behavioral health services.

“I don’t see a county anywhere in the state that funds behavioral health services, that coordinates behavioral health services, that has partners committed to collective outcomes for clients and families as Douglas County,” Alvarado said. “It doesn’t happen in other parts of Kansas, and I’m not sure it happens in very many places across the nation.”