Gulf Coast Center is devoted to advancing health equity, improving availability and access to services, and eliminating health disparities in our communities. We recognize the spectrum of cultural health beliefs and practices, preferred languages, and communication needs that our community possesses. Gulf Coast Center provides a culturally based framework for care services. We recruit, retain, and promote staff that reflect the diversity of the population that we and our community partners serve.
Gulf Coast Center provides accessible, efficient and quality services to support the independent and healthy living of those we serve. Every day, our counselors, therapists, psychiatrists, case workers, peers, support, and administrative staff help our clients get and stay healthy and achieve their greatest potential.
We provide a range of services and support for people in Galveston and Brazoria counties with mental health, substance use, and intellectual and developmental disability (IDD) needs. We also provide additional community services, including community education and disaster recovery support.
Gulf Coast Center is one of 39 community centers in Texas. Around the state, these centers:
- Manage and provide lower cost community-based services across all 254 Texas counties, touching the lives of more than 500,000 people with intellectual and developmental disabilities, serious mental illness, and substance use disorders
- Provide a vital lifeline for Texans in mental health emergency and crisis situations, including veterans and their families
- Represent a public investment in essential services that reduce demand on higher cost government systems, including institutions, jails, prisons, hospitals, and other local health care entities
- Ensure local control of resources, responsiveness to community needs, partnerships with local law enforcement, schools, healthcare entities and other community-based organizations
You can learn about Texas’ other community centers at the Texas Council website.
Mission and Values
Gulf Coast Center’s mission is to provide accessible, efficient and quality services to support the independent and healthy living of those we serve.
Humanity
We value people by serving individuals and families with care and compassion.
Excellence
We value the pursuit of operational excellence by striving to gain efficiencies, decrease costs, and enhance service delivery through innovation.
Accountability
We value achievement of an exemplary standard of accountability for our individual and collective performance.
Loyalty
We value the crucial role which family members and other natural supports play in effective treatment.
Teamwork
We value collaboration to efficiently maximize resources and improve outcomes of care.
Honor
We value united and uncompromising resolve as we steadfastly safeguard and evolve our work environment to uphold education, responsible self-direction, and collaborative coaching.
You
We value commitment to build and strengthen partnerships that benefit the needs and values of our community as a whole.
Better community healthcare promoting healthy living
Our History
There was a time when state institutions were the only support source available to citizens suffering from severe mental disabilities.
In 1963, President John F. Kennedy proposed a broad new program that included community mental health centers and signed the Community Mental Health Center Act into law. In 1965, the Texas Legislature passed the Texas Mental Health and Mental Retardation Act, now known as the Texas Mental Health and Intellectual Disabilities Act. It authorized the creation of community centers to serve as local agencies that would work in partnership with the state and federal government to develop community-based services as alternatives to institutional care. That cooperative approach has driven the Texas “community center” care system for nearly 50 years.
The doors of Gulf Coast Center’s first facility opened on December 1, 1969, to provide mental retardation services in La Marque. By October 1971, services had been expanded to include mental health. The Gulf Coast Center has evolved into the suite of integrated, whole-person services we provide today as a Certified Community Behavioral Health Clinic (CCHBC). To achieve CCBHC status, Gulf Coast Center has distinguished itself as efficiently reducing healthcare disparities for our community. This designation demonstrates a commitment to an accountable, culturally competent framework that broadens access to care services for anyone seeking Primary Health, Mental Health, Intellectual and Developmental Disorders (I/DD), and Substance Use Disorder (SUD) services, regardless of their ability to pay. Integrated transitions between service agencies, especially for co-occurring and complex diagnoses, are bridges that must be crossed to ensure safe and equitable care. Gulf Coast Center coordinates that care and provides the wrap-around services needed to keep the community in services and services in the community.
