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We are very fortunate as a group that we have so much friendly support from many friends in the community. We have friends who have shared a location for us to meet (GreenTree Church and Community Center), friends who come by to contribute snacks and other resources (you know who you are!) and now we even have a community group who has given the Peer Center a five hundred dollar grant to help with programming!

We wish to thank the Adult Mental Health and Substance Abuse Advisory Committee at CenterPoint Human Services for inviting us to apply for this grant! We will be using these funds to:

1. bring a dietitian to GreenTree to instruct us on nutrition for our minds and our bodies and
2. host a self advocacy class using the FREEDOM SELF ADVOCACY curriculum produced by the National Mental Health Consumers Self-Help ClearingHouse.

This organization is one of the technical assistance centers funded by SAMHSA that helps consumer organizations with support and training. In fact, one of the ClearingHouse staff is coming from Pennsylvania in September to offer a training institute to help interested peer specialists learn to present this curriculum in other communities! So this grant is opening some marvelous doors just by association with this project!

We are so grateful to the Advisory Committee and hope that this curriculum will help many people gain more benefit from their services through self-advocacy!

The National Mental Health Consumers’ Self-Help Clearinghouse is affiliated with the Mental Health Association of Southeast Pennsylvania. It is an organization that focuses on offering technical assistance to consumer organizations and self-help groups across the country. Funded for much of its history in part by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, it has been considered by the federal government as a valuable asset to people trying to promote mental health recovery. We are very fortunate in North Carolina that the Clearing House has been a big part of helping us grow our own ‘consumer movement.’

Executive Director Joseph Rogers was the key presenter for the “Bright Ideas Forum” hosted by NC CANSO in 2010 and he and Susan Rogers have also presented information for the North Carolina Mental Health Consumer’s Organization.

To learn more about The Clearing House and review its many publications, check out their web site at www.mhself-help.org 

GreenTree Peer Center and NC CANSO sponsored Susan Rogers, Director of the National Mental Health Consumer’s Self-Help Clearinghouse, to present the Freedom Self-Advocacy curriculum at GreenTree on September 19 and 20.  People as far away as Raleigh, Charlotte, and the mountains participated while most of the crowd came from Winston-Salem.

It was an exciting opportunity, because peers were able to enter into important and empowering discussions that could only happen in such a venue. Susan shared a history of the empowerment movement among people with lived experience as it began in the northeastern U.S. She gave specific action steps that can help people express themselves clearly when advocating at the personal level or at the system level. When people left the training, they seemed to feel united around a common hope that their voices and ideas will impact their own lives, their communities, and this state!