Entering the beautiful new Navos Mental Health and Wellness Center, I thought, "Boy, I bet Mom would have been amazed and very proud."

Please click the photo above for more.

The occasion was the open house last Thursday for the center's facility at Ambaum Boulevard and South 136th Street in Burien. Navos, the private nonprofit organization that operates the center, wanted to show off the building's completed first floor and talk about plans for the upper two floors.

Mom was among the small group of houswives/volunteers, who along with mental health professionals and government officials, got the mental health center up and running in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

It was placed in a one-story vacant elementary school near the airport.

After she died, center officials graciously named renamed the location the "Bernadine P. Mathison Campus." Ironically, that is where I attended sixth grade. As a kid, I never imagined in my wildest dreams that my school would be named after my mother.

It was right down the hill from what is now Mathison Park. Yep, that's where I grew up. Mom loved trees and wanted to preserve them. Dad donated the property to the city of Burien in 1999.

It's funny how much one involved citizen can positively impact her community, even nearly a quarter century after her passing.

Anyway, Mom never expected the center would expand to a three-story building. Staffers say the new facility will allow them to triple the number of families and young children from at risk homes who receive critically needed early intervention treatment and services.

They point out that for every dollar invested in early intervention of young children, $7 is returned to society as those kids grow into adults.

Development coordinator Summer Tilley showed me around the completed first floor. It currently houses child and family services, the community access department, the domestic violence program and the Program for Assertive Community Treatment (PACT.)

She showed me the office furniture generously donated by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. We agreed that used Gates furniture is better than most people's new stuff. The center's other programs are still back at the original school building. But since the location at 1010 S. 146th St. is under the third-runway flight path, the center must move out by July. The jet noise is definitely not conducive to good mental health. Even back in the 1960s, with only one runway, teaching came to a halt while the planes flew over. Navos staffers envision the completed facility as a national model for mental health and wellness programs.

Plans include an employment-training center, a client-operated cafŽ and catering business, a community conference center, dedicated waiting and program spaces to ensure client privacy and expansion space for other innovative programs.

Next door are 36 apartment units for low-income clients with serious, chronic mental illness.

Besides a bigger, fancier and more quiet location, the new building is on a bus line and more accessible to many of the center's low-income clients.

So far, Navos has secured about 64 percent of the money needed to get the second and third floors finished by next year. The cafe and community center are slated to open by 2013. For more information on fundraising, visit navos.org.

I suppose Mom's interest in a Highline mental health center began in the 1940s as a young mother with a bunch of kids, isolated on five acres out in the Burien countryside. She had to send my older brothers off to the store a mile away to get groceries. She often wished for more support.

But eventually, Dad got into Boeing middle management and there was more money (though they always remained incredibly frugal.) The family also moved into a bigger house, Mom learned to drive, the children got older, and the neighbors got closer. She got out more and could use her talents on things more rewarding than housework.

The thing is, my parents were the most self-reliant people I have ever known. But that didn't mean they forgot when they had needed support or that others might need help.

That's an important thing to remember these days when we seem to be shrinking into a "me society" that reveres the rich and disrespects those focused on service and community.

I guess that last comment was a bit off the subject but it felt good to get it off my chest. I gotta say, it did wonders for my mental health.