There's an old saying which says that it takes a village to raise a child. It also takes a “village,” though, to support people who are working their recovery from a mental illness.
Ultimately, for people who use state-funded services as one of their recovery tools, the best village is a network of service providers and other recipients who are working together to make sure that everyone who is living with a mental illness is fully supported taking on the full rights and responsibilities of citizenship in our communities, country, and world.
The Michigan Recovery Network a project of the
Recovery Institute of Southwest Michigan, Inc., is building that village.
What is the Recovery Institute?
The Recovery Institute is a Peer-run, Peer-operated organization that provides people who are living with mental illnesses with some of the supplementary services they need to work their recoveries. The organization offers classes including
Personal Action Toward Health (PATH),
Wellness Recovery Action Planning (WRAP), and
Pathways 4 U. There are also social activities that engage people in the arts, video groups, writing, and furthering their educational goals.
In addition, the Recovery Institute provides Peer outreach to local shelters, a psychiatric inpatient unit and a Community Mental Health Access center.
Exactly what is the Michigan Recovery Network?
The Michigan Recovery Network has two primary areas of work:
- Creating a network of agencies that are actively working both individually and together to improve their recovery cultures.
- Creation of a network of Peer-run organizations to allow those organizations to share their ideas, problems, solutions, and ideas about generating funds and other resources.
To create the network of agencies, the Recovery Institute began by recruiting five agencies to take the “Recovery Self-Assessment Survey (RSA) to help determine how well each agency is doing in promoting a recovery culture.
The RSA is different than the
Recovery Enhancing Environment survey, the REE, which was covered by MRCE earlier in 2011. The REE was a survey that only included people using the agencies for their mental health services. Everyone involved in the participating agencies took the RSA – recipients, staff, and the family members of people using the agencies.
“One of our goals for the project is to help organizations become more recovery oriented and increase their employment of people in recovery at all levels. To do so, we felt it was important to get everyone’s impressions and we thought the RSA did this better than the REE,” said Marcia Probst, CPSS, who helped MRCE compile the information for this article.
Now, the Recovery Institute is working with those agencies to help them identify how to improve their results.
The network for Peer-run organizations is also well underway. The Recovery Institute is in the process of developing a website for the network, and a
Facebook page is up, running, and active.
The entire project is the result of a grant from the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) grant that was awarded to the Recovery Institute on August of 2010. The grant will run for three years, and the organization is already busy looking for ways to continue the Network when those funds run out. Options include writing other grants and asking participating agencies to pay a fee for the RSA assessment and the follow-up consulting required.
How Can I Get Involved?
The Michigan Recovery Network is most definitely open for business. For more information join the
organization's Facebook page, visit the
Recovery Institutes's website, or call the Recovery Institute at (269) 343-6725.
By Dawn R. Wolfe