Welcome to the Citizens for Mental Health Web Pages!

Although the project, Citizens for Mental Health, is now officially wrapped up, we hope that the momentum and energy it helped to generate will spur on further voluntary sector action related to federal level mental health policy initiatives.

What is Citizens for Mental Health?

Citizens for Mental Health was a two year CMHA project funded through Health Canada as part of the Sectoral Involvement in Departmental Policy Development (SIDPD), Voluntary Sector Initiative. The project officially wrapped up in spring of 2004.

The purpose of the project was to:

•Strengthen the capacity of voluntary sector stakeholders for meaningful participation in national level policy initiatives by engaging them in the process of developing a national mental health policy framework.

To this end, CMHA pursued a 3-phase consultative process with a diversity of voluntary sector organizations. Initially, a 'Participatory Guide' was developed and distributed widely as an introduction to the project. In the spring of 2003, a number of small group forums were held in each region across Canada, culminating in a national synthesis meeting in September 2003. During Phase 3, project activities continued with a web-based discussion in which participants shared their perspectives and considered the directions established during the first two phases of the project. This phase also saw activities return to the regions in the form of wrap-up meetings and the development of regional web sites.

What's on this site?

Project Resources
• To find out more about the background and process of the project, please refer to the 'Participatory Guide'.
• A set of issue-based backgrounders were created for the project consultations. These introduce key mental health-related issues, highlighting government and community-based responses.
• To learn about the policy framework and capacity-building outcomes of the project, see the National Synthesis Forum Final Report and the final project report, Mental Health Priorities of the Voluntary Sector: Development of a Framework for Action.
• Finally, as a result of the consultations and the general consensus on the importance of housing and income security as mental health-related issues, the original backgrounders on these two topics were expanded into issue papers.

Links to the Regions
• Visit the regional web sites of the Citizens project that provide more resources and links of regional and national interest.

Links to External Reports
• This series of links, categorized by issue, provides access to key reports and initiatives that are related to the directions of the Citizens project.

Links to Organizations
• Find links to the organizational members of the Canadian Alliance on Mental Illness and Mental Health (CAMIMH).