With help from business-minded people at the University’s Innovation Park, the Baton Rouge Speech and Hearing Foundation, or BRSHF, has transformed into the Emerge Center for Communication, Behavior and Development.
The clinic moved from its old location on West Roosevelt Street to its new location in Innovation Park at 8000 Innovation Park Drive on April 4. Faculty and staff participated in a ribbon-cutting ceremony to usher in the transformation.
The Emerge Center fuses a variety of technologies and therapeutic techniques to assist people who face a variety of challenges communicating with other people.
According to the center’s staff, techniques include occupational therapy, speech therapy, audiology and various behavioral therapies, including a comprehensive program for autistic children. The center also boasts a therapeutic preschool program for children with developmental language disorders.
Innovation Park is a University program that helps local and student businesses alike to promote, build and expand their businesses through use of its technologies, buildings and programs, including the Business Incubator, which provides businesses with tools for accomplishing these tasks.
Personnel from the Emerge Center said they chose to relocate to a facility in Innovation Park after investigating various buildings across the region because it offered the clinic the equipment and space it would need to best increase the quality of life for its clients.
The Emerge Center’s extensive and multifaceted approach to addressing communication disorders separates it from every program of its ilk on the Gulf Coast.
The Emerge Center is better equipped to fulfill the tenets of its mission in its new building in the University’s Innovation Park. The building is more than three times the size of its previous headquarters and is fitted with equipment integral to its comprehensive treatment plan.
Facilities include group therapy classrooms complete with parental observation stations, individual therapy rooms, a fully stocked occupationally therapeutic gym, a training center, cafeteria and resource lending library.
At its new and expanded campus, the Emerge Center can help up to 300 children weekly with its therapeutic research program and 100 children annually in its Integrated Autism Program. Staff can also treat more than 55 clients in need of occupational therapy weekly and has increased the scope of its audiology services by 100 percent.
The foundation worked with psychology professors from the University in 2004 to develop a state-of-the art autism treatment program and has since recruited the most highly trained therapist of Childhood Apraxia Speech in all of Louisiana.
In 2011, the foundation planned to expand its campus and services, and in 2012, its staff solicited various donors and raised more than $7 million to move to Innovation Park.