How a New Market Tax Credit Helped Build a Place for Memphis Kids in Crisis
- Alliance Healthcare Services
- May 27
- 4 min read
For a long time, when a child in Memphis went into a behavioral health crisis, the closest right answer was hours away.
Families drove past three emergency rooms that weren't built for this. Kids spent the night in adult hallways, on adult stretchers, waiting for a bed that didn't exist in their own county. Some ended up in juvenile detention instead of treatment, not because anyone wanted that, but because the system did not yet have a third option.
On June 1, 2026, that changed. The Children & Youth Wellness Center opens for full operations at 602 Malcomb Street: fifteen crisis stabilization beds, on-site clinicians, and a building designed for children ages 4 to 17 and the families who love them.
This is the story of one of the partnerships that got it built.
A door that had to exist
There was no dedicated pediatric crisis stabilization facility for Memphis and Shelby County before this one.
Children in crisis here have been treated in spaces designed for adults, or sent home before they were stable, or routed into juvenile justice when neither home nor hospital was safe. None of that is care. All of it adds up.
Alliance Healthcare Services has been the region's largest behavioral health nonprofit for over fifty years. We built the adult Crisis Wellness Center on Broad Avenue in 2025. We knew the children's center had to come next. The only question was how to pay for it.
What it actually takes to build an $11 million crisis center
A behavioral health building is not a typical construction project.
It needs sightlines and safety hardware. It needs spaces sized for a four-year-old and spaces sized for a sixteen-year-old. It needs a calm room, a family room, an assessment room, a pharmacy, and beds that meet state licensing standards. The full project landed at roughly $11 million.
State partners stepped up. Local government stepped up. Philanthropy stepped up. Even with all of that, a gap remained, the kind of gap that can stall a project for a year or quietly shrink it from fifteen beds to ten.
A nonprofit has two ways to close a gap like that. Take on debt, which costs operational dollars every year we should be spending on staff and care. Or find a financing partner whose mission is to invest in the communities most lenders overlook.
We found the second kind.
What a New Markets Tax Credit actually is
The federal New Markets Tax Credit program is one of the most useful tools in community development, and one of the least understood.
In plain English: the U.S. Treasury allocates tax credits to mission-driven lenders called Community Development Entities. Those lenders use the credits to attract private investment, and they channel that investment into projects in historically underinvested neighborhoods. Health clinics. Grocery stores. Schools. The kinds of buildings that change a block.
For a project like the Children & Youth Wellness Center, an NMTC layer can close a multi-million-dollar gap without piling debt onto operations. The capital stays in the building. The cash flow stays in the care.
Why Hope said yes
The lender that brought the NMTC layer to this project is Hope Enterprise Corporation, a CDFI working across the Mid-South to build wealth in places most banks have walked away from.
Hope's mission is not unlike our own. They look at a neighborhood, a family, a Memphis ZIP code that has been told no for a generation, and they ask what it would take to change that. They have financed health clinics, child care centers, affordable housing, and grocery stores in communities where capital simply does not flow on its own.
When we brought them the children's center, they did not treat it as a transaction. They understood that an empty lot on Malcomb Street and a building full of beds for kids in crisis were two completely different things, and that the distance between them was a financing problem worth solving.
They closed the gap. They stayed in the room past closing. And on ribbon-cutting day, they were part of the photo. SEE BELOW!
What the building will do
Inside the Children & Youth Wellness Center, a child in a behavioral health crisis will be met by a clinician within hours, in a room designed for a child.
Families will have a place to land while their kid stabilizes, with people who can answer the questions that nobody could answer in an ER hallway. Schools and pediatricians will have somewhere to send a student who needs more than an outpatient appointment but less than a hospital. First responders will have a non-jail option for a youth in crisis.
When a child is ready to go home, the center hands the family off to ongoing care, not to silence. Outpatient therapy. Psychiatry. School-based support. The connections that keep one crisis from becoming the next one.
This is what Building wellness in the community, one person, one family at a time actually looks like, sized for a kid.
The partners who got us here
The Children & Youth Wellness Center exists because a long list of partners refused to let it not exist:
Every one of them looked at a community without a pediatric crisis door and decided to help build one.
If your child is in crisis
We are now open! Alliance's crisis services answer every hour of every day.
Call (901) 369-1410, or call or text 988. We will pick up.
The Children & Youth Wellness Center began full operations on June 1, 2026, at 602 Malcomb Street.
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