About The UCCS Aging Center
The mission of the UCCS Aging Center is to enhance the quality of life for older adults and their families through excellence in psychological training, services, research, and integrated care partnerships.Aging Center History
In January 1999, the UCCS Aging Center (then called the CU Aging Center) opened its doors in the Golf Acres Shopping Center on North Hancock Avenue in Colorado Springs. Its purpose was to serve as a training clinic for the still-developing UCCS doctoral program in clinical geropsychology as well as a community mental health clinic for underserved older adults.
In its first year, four part-time faculty and staff and three master's students at the Aging Center provided 460 hours of service to 70 clients. In 2005, three second-year doctoral students began training at the Aging Center; at that time, the UCCS Clinical Psychology Ph.D. program, with an emphasis in Geropsychology, was one of only four in the country, and the first in the Rocky Mountain region.
In 2012, the Aging Center received the Joe Henjum Senior Accolades Award for Integrated Caregiver Services, following the previous year's honor from the El Pomar Foundation Awards of Excellence as a finalist in the health care category. The UCCS Clinical Psychology Ph.D. program was also selected by the Council of Professional Geropsychology Training Programs for the 2012 Innovative Training Award.
In 2014, the Aging Center moved to the Lane Center for Academic Health Sciences on the UCCS campus. Most recently, the Aging Center celebrated its 25th anniversary in 2024, continuing the tradition of training doctoral- and master’s-level psychology graduate students in addition to expanding to training of master’s-level social work students.
Academic Focus
The Aging Center is a nonprofit mental health clinic affiliated with the University of Colorado Colorado Springs (UCCS). It is currently one of the few psychology training clinics that addresses practicum and predoctoral internship training requirements in geropsychology. Clinical training focuses on core competencies in assessment, including Memory Clinic screening and comprehensive neuropsychological evaluations, and both individual- and group-based intervention. Trainees gain experience addressing the mental health needs of older adults and their caregivers through provision of individual psychotherapy and facilitation of process- and skills-based groups including Caregiver Family Therapy (CFT), mindfulness skills, and cognitive skills training.