A community counseling center at California Lutheran University is starting to reach out beyond the Thousand Oaks campus.

For more than 20 years, the Community Counseling Services center has had a symbiotic role: offering low-cost counseling in the community and providing practical training for CLU graduate students who want to become marriage and family therapists.

Now the center is expanding its role, reaching out to local schools, including Conejo School in Thousand Oaks, which has a high percentage of low-income students, said center director Christopher Christian.

"The school has a population who need services," Christian said. "I have a population that needs to provide services. This is a great partnership to have with schools."

The center also recently collaborated with Neighborhoods for Learning, which has several preschools in this area, to provide a support group for fathers and their babies.

The center "has been an answer to my prayers," said Ana Alvarez, an outreach director for Conejo and Park Oaks elementary schools.

"We do have a big need, especially in the Hispanic community, for counseling," Alvarez said.

"We have parents who need help with their kids' behavior and academics. And a lot of our parents are immigrants, so they go through a stage of depression, of feeling lonely when they come here."

In addition, the center is working to become something of a community hub, offering more than counseling.

Christian is bringing in artwork done by CLU professors and students. He also hopes to start a film festival.

"We want to not just be associated with problems," Christian said.

"We want to be associated with enrichment. It destigmatizes it. Someone coming through the door is not just coming in because they have problems."

The primary purpose of the center, however, remains providing training for graduate students and counseling for the public.

The center offers individual, couples and family counseling as well as support groups, which means graduate students receive training in counseling a broad range of people.

Before they start their training, students must have completed 18 credits of coursework, including a class in law and ethics.

Then, as they do their training in individual and group counseling, they are regularly supervised.

They also have in-service sessions, in which they hear from community experts in such areas as alcohol treatment and juvenile delinquency.

Thousand Oaks might be an affluent community where most people can afford private care, but there are people who can't, Christian said, so the center offers counseling on a sliding scale with sessions costing from $5 to $50 based on family size and income.

Many clients hear about the center from existing patients. Others, some of them indigent, are referred by local churches or social service organizations.

"There's this stereotype that says, 'Why do we need community counseling when people can afford private counseling?'" Christian said. "But there's this sort of invisible group who needs services and couldn't afford them otherwise."