M+A Architects honored with 2018 Healthcare Environment Award

Contract Magazine, in partnership with The Center For Health Design, has published the winners of their 2018 Healthcare Environment Awards, including honoring Little Fork Family Advocacy Center, designed by M+A Architects, as the winner within the Conceptual Design category. The Healthcare Environment Awards honor innovative architectural and interior design solutions that enhance the quality of healthcare delivery, with the Conceptual Design category recognizing professional, unbuilt projects.

Little Fork Family Advocacy Center is conceived by Clermont County Assistant Prosecutor Scott O’Reilly as an entirely new care site model intended to end cycles of domestic and sexual abuse by co-locating comprehensive programming on one campus to address medical, legal and recovery needs of impacted families, in a more timely and holistic manner. M+A was enlisted to create a vision and design for this new facility, along with the entire comprehensive care campus where it will be co-located with a YWCA offering temporary housing, community meeting spaces and park facilities, that would support both access to care for impacted families, and to improve their experience of care. Engaging whimsical, interactive artistic elements and incorporating nature and the outdoors throughout, design of the facility is intended to create healing experiences by providing positive distractions for children and families as they begin their journey of healing and recovery immediately upon arrival.

“We are so honored to have been able to support Clermont County leadership by helping them create a vision for Little Fork,” says P’Elizabeth Koelker, AIA, Principal and Studio Director for M+A Architects. “This opportunity to engage architecture and design to support this incredible initiative has been extremely rewarding already, and we are hopeful that our work will help this visionary care campus actually become a reality in the not too distant future.”

Currently preparing to enter initial fundraising efforts, project leadership is hopeful to have funding secured and to be able to start construction within the coming year, in an effort to open the doors on this transformative project as early as the Spring of 2021.