The Quest Fund gifted the University of Oregon’s College of Education $6 million for its HEDCO Clinic to assist with yearly operational costs for its programs, which provide low-cost educational services to the Eugene-Springfield community.
Located in the southern wing of the HEDCO building on campus, the clinic is currently the home of the Center for Healthy Relationships, the Speech-Language-Hearing Center, and the CTL Reading Clinic. For six years, the clinic has provided master’s degree students of many disciplines with hands-on experience in a clinical setting.
The new endowment will cover the daily operational costs, expand and update the existing service and create more opportunity for students to get hands-on experience, dean of the College of Education Randy Kamphaus said.
The endowment will also allow for more existing funding to go toward increasing research efforts for the College of Education, one of the more successful research programs at the university. UO is currently ranked second in the nation for education graduate programs in research productivity per faculty member and is in the top 15 overall for education programs.
The financial support of this endowment will also allow the clinic to establish a center for the family-based treatment of autism.
“The endowment will support technology updates in these services,” Kamphaus said. “It will also help us double the size of the office and the current services.”
The federal-fund research on autism, leading by Dr. Wendy Machalicek, will have an opportunity to expand services that focus on working with families, Kamphaus said.
