Intercultural Family Services plans to scale up services and increase visibility under newly appointed CEO

He has only been in the top spot for two weeks, but one of the things Javier Alvarado plans to do is raise the profile of Intercultural Family Services, Inc. (IFS)

For almost 50 years this West Philadelphia-based institution has quietly been on the front line of providing supportive services, especially mental health, for thousands of families.

“This is a critical time in Philadelphia, with so many people in the community needing the behavioral and mental health support services we provide,” said longtime IFS board chair Maria Pajil Battle in a statement announcing Alvarado’s appointment. One in six Philadelphians has been diagnosed with some form of mental illness.

Alvarado wants more people to understand the work of the nonprofit.

Founded in 1979 as the volunteer-run resettlement agency Asian American Services Center, the organization was later incorporated as the Philadelphia Refugee Service Center in 1984. It changed its name to IFS in 1992 with the hope it better reflected the organization’s work providing community-based health and social services to refugees and immigrants.

During the early 2000s, IFS was part of an effort to bring attention to the mental health struggles of the city’s Cambodian refugees who were suffering from the aftermath of the genocide by the Khmer Rouge. Local experts calculated that as many as half of Cambodian adults were afflicted with profound mental anguish that was compounded by local sightings of former Khmer Rouge members, who had blended into the city’s population.

» READ MORE: A Cruel Past Lingers

Cambodians “really need a lot of help. More than anybody else, they need help,” said Evelyn Marcha-Hidalgo, the longtime executive director of IFS, who served as CEO/executive director for more than 40 years starting in 1981. Marcha-Hidalgo told a reporter at the time that the city and the state were paying little attention to their concerns.

Currently IFS has a variety of programs including its outpatient behavioral health clinic, family-based mental health services, and truancy prevention services which operate in 70 schools across West and Northeast Philadelphia. Its housing program, its oldest service, has provided homeownership counseling since 1983.

The agency is also home to the Enhancing Parenting Skills program which is designed for parents who are in need of improving their parenting techniques and want the support of other parents.

Alvarado, a licensed clinical social worker, is one of the few Latino males in a field predominantly white and female. He has more than 30 years of social work and behavioral health experience. One of his earliest jobs was working with teenage males who were about to become fathers. “So many parts of the system has failed them,” he said.

He also served in the Army National Guard for 29 years which included two combat deployments, resigning as a lieutenant colonel in 2019. Alvarado said he is most proud of is the behavioral health program that served 4,800 service members which he helped develop as chief behavioral health officer for the Connecticut Army National Guard.

Alvarado is no stranger to the city. About a decade ago, his daughter opted to attend Temple University after high school, which meant weekend car trips to visit her. And then she decided to stay, fell in love, married and now Alvarado has three grandchildren.

Over the years he has gotten to know the city and while he isn’t a big sports fan, he does love the Eagles.

He is, however, still a stranger to Tastykakes, water ice, Peanut Chews and soft pretzels.

“I love the diversity of the city. The amazing food and the people,” he said.

Alvarado is also no stranger to poverty, which he said is a major cause of so much stress. He was born in Connecticut to poor parents who moved from Puerto Rico to Waterbury.

“I wondered why we had to move so much,” Alvarado said of his parents’ search for affordable housing that was clean and safe.

At 17, after graduating from high school, he wanted to prove his American bonafides to those who had bullied him as a kid, by joining the military.

“I also needed a way to pay for college,” Alvarado said. He received both a bachelor’s and master’s degree from the University of Connecticut.

Another big to-do on Alvarado’s list is to scale up services. But that means recruiting more mental health staff at a time when it is difficult to find talent.

He is also concerned about ensuring his current 120 IFS employees don’t burn out, a major problem within the health-care field.

In a research report he coauthored, he discovered one out of three of health-care workers experienced the pandemic as a traumatic stress event. In his previous post as the director of social work at Yale New Haven Health System (YNHHS), he helped create an employee peer support program to manage the stress and anxiety that arose during the pandemic. The program improved the safety and mental health of those in severe crisis situations. Now he plans to advocate with his funders so that he can pay his staff better for doing the difficult work of working with families in crisis.

In December, IFS will move across Chestnut Street into its new 36,000-square-foot headquarters, which will provide ample room for Alvarado’s future plans.