Wasatch House celebrates new building with old friends

PROVO (Daily Herald) -- Maddy Talbert is one of only a few employees who wish they weren't needed.

Talbert is the director of the Wasatch House, a clubhouse that helps people with mental illnesses learn job, life and coping skills and help prepare them to be out in the real world as much as possible. She loves her job, and she loves helping the members. But her goal is to help those people so that she and the clubhouse won't be needed anymore.

"That's what we like to hear," she said.

She knows, though, that every community will always have people who struggle with mental illnesses, and that is why she pushed Wasatch Mental Health and the Utah County community at large for a new building for Wasatch House, which had been housed in a 50-year-old building that just wasn't meeting the participants' needs. About five years ago they started planning and raising funds. A year ago they knocked the old building down and rented another building across the street, and watched as the new clubhouse was erected.

On Friday, Talbert, government officials and community leaders and dozens of members of Wasatch House gathered in the new building in southeast Provo to celebrate the opening. And boy, did they celebrate. No sooner had the ribbon fallen to the ground than members started waving their ribbons along to "Celebration" by Kool and the Gang and woohooing along with the music. County Commissioner Gary Anderson started dancing.

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