Daffaney Jenkins Webster, a board-certified psychiatric mental health nurse practitioner, always envisioned becoming an entrepreneur. This year, she opened ReLeaf Behavioral & Wellness Clinic on Plank Road, bringing her back to her roots in North Baton Rouge, a part of her journey that she never anticipated.

The mental health clinic is built on Webster’s years of experience operating the nonprofit, Reflection of the Green Leaf, which she established in 2018. The organization aims to develop resources and enrichment opportunities for people with mental health concerns, with an innovative re-entry program for East Baton Rouge Parish prisoners now taking shape.

Webster’s career began in 2007 when she worked as a psychiatric nurse at Eastern Louisiana Mental Health Hospital in Jackson. In the challenging environment, she met and cared for patients experiencing severe mental illness.

“Some of them are judicially committed, and some are not guilty by reason of insanity,” Webster explains. “The patients are hospitalized there. That’s their home. That was the trueness of psychological disorders: hallucinating, hearing voices and self-mutilation.”

In 2013, Webster transitioned to forensic psychiatry, working alongside parish courts throughout Greater New Orleans. In the clinical setting, she saw how art served as a therapeutic outlet for people struggling with mental illness through painting groups.

“It was a way for those patients to express themselves,” she says. “They would come to you hearing voices. You’d ask them what the voices were telling them. And they would paint.”

That experience inspired Webster’s desire to create opportunities for healing through creativity. “The art was very therapeutic, but there wasn’t anything that I knew of relating to mental health and art [in Baton Rouge]. At that time, I didn’t see much of it in the art world,” she notes.

The same year she established the nonprofit, its flagship event, Art Avenue, was created to bring together people from diverse backgrounds and incorporate art as a means of expression and healing. “I was trying to establish a world where people in the community who had mental health concerns or illnesses could incorporate art into their lives in some form or fashion,” Webster shares. Then, Reflection of the Green Leaf received funding for a polymer clay art therapy project for the female population at East Baton Rouge Parish Prison. From there, Webster’s vision for a comprehensive re-entry program began to take shape.

“You want to start with the most vulnerable populations,” Webster says. “Why not start in the parish prison? Nothing is happening there that is therapeutic outside of medication management.”

Thanks to new funding and collaborations with several local organizations, Reflection of the Green Leaf will soon begin supporting and implementing mental health initiatives to benefit local inmates.

“We’re going to start in the prison with art, mindfulness, education and medication management,” Webster explains. “Once an inmate transitions out, we continue it in the community. Then they’ll come [to the clinic] and receive their mental health care as well.”

Webster’s goal is to decrease recidivism. “We follow this person from incarceration out into the community with creative and coping resources, in addition to providing mental health care,” she says.

By accepting Medicare and Medicaid and through partnerships with local organizations like BREC, Webster ensures that the services are more accessible to the most vulnerable members of the community.

“The clinic will reach areas that are underserved but also people that really need the services who are scared to get them or don’t know how,” Webster says. “That’s what makes the Green Leaf different.”