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As the community continued to grow, in the 1970s the mental health clinic had expanded to 35 staff members. The Clinic was now housed in an additional four units in the Creech Road shopping Center as well as other rented space scattered throughout the County. The clinic provided mental health and substance abuse assessments, individual and family outpatient counseling, psychiatric medical services, prevention education and a 12-bed adult residential substance abuse treatment facility operated out of donated trailers in Immokalee.
 By this time, the Clinic had reached a crisis as public funding and facility space became an increasingly difficult challenge. The problem got so bad that individual counseling sessions were being held in the parking lot of the Clinics overcrowded facilities. In 1974, Doug and Mercy Bathey generously loaned and later donated $200,000 to acquire the 10 acre parcel of land needed to construct a new facility on Golden Gate Parkway, where the David Lawrence Centers main campus is currently located.
To help garner financial support from the local community for the Clinics work in 1976, a separate not-for-profit called the Foundation for Mental Health, Inc., now known as the David Lawrence Foundation, was formed.
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