Fresno Community Center Provides Mental Health Care For Seniors, In Punjabi

Harjit Kaur, 66, found out about the Khalsa Community Center through a friend. A Sikh originally from the northern Indian state of Punjab, she now resides in Fresno, California, with her family. She was surprised to learn about a space in her city where Sikh seniors like her could participate in events and form community. 

Like many South Asian seniors in multi-generational households, Harjit Kaur lives with her adult children and grandchildren, in keeping with longstanding cultural traditions. But when family members leave each day for work or school, or to run errands, it leaves Harjit Kaur alone at home, feeling isolated.

Her isolation is exacerbated because Harjit Kaur, like many Sikh seniors, faces a language barrier: she speaks fluent Punjabi, but not English. So, despite the familiarity of a secure family setting, excursions outside the home and navigating life in a new country become particularly challenging for her as a non-native English speaker.

According to Prableen Kaur, Executive Director of the Khalsa Foundation California (KFC), seniors like Harjit Kaur are often alone at home, creating an epidemic of loneliness within the community. Prableen is the driving force behind the community center, founded in July 2024 to provide services, educational support, and culturally rooted programs for the Punjabi Sikh community. 

This language barrier, coupled with the lack of access to a car, further hampers their ability to socialize, exacerbating mental health issues, she says.

“They’re lonely, they’re isolated, they don’t have the community that they had back home, where they could walk out and have friends everywhere.”

A Language of Faith

Prableen Kaur had been a volunteer with the Khalsa Foundation, an international nonprofit dedicated to serving the Sikh community in the United Kingdom, before she moved to California and founded Khalsa Foundation California in 2018 to serve the region’s Sikh population. 

Varying estimates suggest that California is home to between 250,000 and 500,000 Sikhs, making it one of the largest Sikh diasporas in the world outside South Asia. The community is heavily concentrated in Central Valley cities like Fresno, with many employed in the agricultural and trucking sectors. 

The primary language spoken by the community is Punjabi, but it is more than just a means of communication. Punjabi is an integral part of cultural and spiritual life and is the primary language of the Guru Granth Sahib, the holy book of the Sikh faith.

An Epidemic of Loneliness

It soon became apparent to Prableen Kaur that the community was struggling with mental health issues, with little to no means to address them in their native Punjabi. 

To meet this need, KFC established the Khalsa Community Center in Fresno in 2024, offering mental health services through a full-time therapist who could provide therapy in Punjabi. 

“From the start, we wanted to involve seniors as much as possible because they’re such an overlooked part of our community,” said Prableen Kaur. 

But mental health services do not necessarily mean a couch-and-chair model of therapy when it comes to seniors in the Sikh community. 

Many of the seniors were born and brought up in South Asia, where mental health remains deeply stigmatized, and the vocabulary to deal with mental health issues is completely different from that in the American context.

Drivers of mental health issues

To Dr. Preet Kaur Sabharwal, a licensed clinical psychologist based in the Bay Area, the lack of community outside immediate family is a serious problem for South Asian seniors. 

Apart from being a mental health practitioner, Sabharwal is the co-founder of the South Asian Mental Health Consortium, a nonprofit that advocates for mental health resources for the South Asian community, hosts conferences, and trains practitioners who want to work within the South Asian community. 

She says that some of the specific issues that may come up within the South Asian context are seniors who will not ask their children for help because it is considered a sign of weakness, shyness surrounding medical issues because they might be embarrassed, and a fear of being a burden on their family.

“We hear a lot from seniors that when they were back home, there weren’t any formalized services, but someone would always show up,” said Sabharwal. “The door was always open; someone would come over for chai; everyone in your neighborhood had the same culture; they spoke the same language.”

A Model of Senior Programming for South Asian Seniors 

Community became the cornerstone of the senior programming model that Prableen Kaur and her team began to design. They focused on organizing gatherings conducted in Punjabi, the language their senior clients felt most comfortable with; in this setting, seniors could enjoy tea and snacks, listen to spiritual discourses about tenets of Sikhi, and play board games and bingo.

“They just wouldn’t come otherwise,” said Prableen Kaur, because the language factor was important – it opened access to community.

Some gurdwaras — Sikh places of worship — also offer similar events, but what sets the Khalsa Community Center apart is that they also have a therapist on staff who not only speaks Punjabi but is from a Sikh cultural background. In mainstream health care systems, companies offer translation services in Punjabi, but that is not as effective as a therapist who speaks Punjabi and, most importantly, understands a Sikh or South Asian cultural context.

The senior events act as an entry point, and if an individual opens up about serious mental health issues, the center’s team can refer them to therapy sessions.

“There are words that they might say in Punjabi that they wouldn’t know how to say in English because it just really doesn’t exist,” said Prableen Kaur. “So it opens up the door to have conversations if you know that someone’s competent in [the cultural] background sitting in front of you.”  

Prableen Kaur and her team also gave rides to seniors who had difficulty finding transportation. 

“I had never imagined that they would give me a ride. They picked me up and even dropped me off after the event!” said Harjit Kaur, who finds the community programs beneficial.

“It’s great for my mental health,” she added. “Whenever I feel stressed, I hope that there is a program coming up at the center. I feel totally refreshed when I return home afterwards.” 

Over dozens of events, the Khalsa Community Center has served more than 150 senior clients over two years; many, like Harjit Kaur, have become regulars. 

A waitlist for services

Apart from testimonies from seniors like Harjit Kaur about relief from the stress of mental health issues, it is difficult to quantify the impact of the Center’s programming on clients’ mental health, especially because the cultural context surrounding mental health is very different from formalized therapy practices in the United States, 

However, two years into its operations, the Khalsa Community Center has come a long way. Since its inception, the center has always had a waitlist. In August 2026, the center’s therapist was finally able to see clients who were on the waitlist in January. Prableen Kaur said that the waitlist prompted her team to reduce outreach, and still, there were 15 people on the waitlist in August, the lowest it has ever been.

The need for the center’s services was clear from the outset. Prableen Kaur estimates that the number of attendees for the events has increased from around 20 in the first few events to more than 30 now, with new participants showing up often.

Working to battle barriers

The Center started as a team of three people with a $750,000 Children and Youth Behavioral Health Initiative grant from the state of California. But the center faces ongoing challenges.

The demand for services far exceeds what they can provide; Prableen Kaur and her team are trying to get medical insurance companies to cover their services, which will offset some of the costs. But the conversations have been frustrating. 

“We’re the only ones providing a Punjabi-speaking therapist, and they said that’s why we have translators,” said Prableen Kaur. “They said your community doesn’t need this.” To keep up with demand, her Center requires more practitioners to support the one therapist they have on staff.

Sabharwal also encountered opposition when she first expressed a desire to work with the South Asian community, especially from her academic advisors.

“I was getting pushback,” she said. Sabharwal was told, ‘Well, your community doesn’t do therapy; they’re the model minority’

But Sabharwal made an unusual discovery once her work actually began. “I have had to unlearn almost everything I learned in graduate school because it would not apply in providing services to this community,” she said. “We need to help support not just the community, but also the providers because they’re not going to be trained to serve this community… 

This insight prompted Sabharwal to establish the South Asian Mental Health Consortium, which regularly conducts workshops and training for South Asian mental health practitioners who want to work with the community. 

Creating language-based mental healthcare models

Sabharwal believes that the South Asian community would benefit greatly if the Khalsa Community Center’s model of providing culturally congruent mental health care could be replicated among other language groups.

It may be complicated to replicate this model of care in all South Asian languages, she cautions, but a language like Hindi, which is spoken in many regions of India and is widely represented by Hindi speakers in the US, might be a good place to start.

Sabharwal is also seeing a steady increase in the number of young South Asian practitioners interested in working within their communities, which could be a useful resource for organizations considering similar language models for mental health services in their communities. 

“What tends to work is when you hire graduate students to do the work because it’s cost-effective, as most graduate students will have a stipend,” she explains. “They’re also more adaptable and want to learn and want to understand this culture.”

If such a program is formalized, the organization can get certified as a training organization, which opens the door to more funding opportunities as well, she added. 

Growing the organization

Recently, the Center received a potentially transformative $6 million Behavioral Health Continuum Infrastructure Program grant from the California Department of Health Care Services, provided they can match it by raising $600,000.

The fund will allow them to move into a larger space next year, scale up their services significantly, and hire more practitioners too, said Prableen Kaur. 

Until then, she and her team continue to give rides to the center’s senior clients.

“They have my WhatsApp number, so they literally call me and be like, ‘Hey, can you come pick me up?’,” said Prableen Kaur. “If we sort that out for them, then there’s no complaint.”