Inclusion In Community

Canadian Mental Health Association, National Office, Toronto, Ontario

Background

People living in communities across Canada are increasingly finding that they can’t rely on the government or the service system to adequately address all of their health and social needs. Instead, people are learning to draw on their own capacities to provide support to one another, and are strengthening the human connections within their communities. The Inclusion in Community project is based on enhancing this awareness of mutual responsibility among ordinary citizens, and building on people’s interdependence and sense of community.

The project involved five CMHA Branches across Ontario² supporting their communities to find new collaborative approaches for addressing the needs of people with mental illness. Each site brought consumers³, families, and generic community groups together to plan and implement a strategy to shift the focus from the exclusive reliance on mental health services to promoting the mental health of people in the community with serious mental health problems.

This shift in focus involved all sectors of the community -- from people with mental illness learning to become less dependent on services and more involved in community life, and community members acting as guides for people with mental illness, to health professionals working collaboratively with other sectors of the community to improve the quality of life for people with mental illness.

By developing collaborative partnerships with a wide range of community members and organizations, the Inclusion project created new and innovative relationships that would help to open up community life to consumer/survivors.

"Isolation from community life is the worst disability."

-John McKnight, I990

Conceptual work for the Inclusion in Community project was accomplished largely by the CMHA’s National Mental Health Services Work Group⁴ through its work on New Framework for Support.

This policy document (which guides CMHA’s thinking about supports for people with mental illness) promotes full community integration of people with mental illness through the mobilization of a range of formal and informal supports in the community. The message of the Framework is that informal supports such as service clubs and recreation facilities are resources for people with mental illness, which can enhance or, in some cases, even replace formal mental health services.

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Summary

Inclusion in Community involved five communities in promoting the inclusion of people with mental illness in the community. Consumers and other community partners joined together to find ways to address the mental health needs of community members with mental illness.

The project was co-ordinated through the CMHA’s National office, funded by Ontario’s Trillium Foundation, and implemented in five selected communities through local CMHA Branch offices. The process of selecting the sites involved several steps. CMHA Branches that wanted to participate demonstrated their interest and ability to carry out the project, and provided a confirmation of interest from potential community partners.

Sites were selected by the national steering committee with a view to achieving both balance and diversity among the communities represented. The sites included a variety of different communities in Ontario: a mix of urban and rural, francophone, anglophone and multilingual speakers. The project brought together citizens from many cultural backgrounds, creating new links between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Canadians, and strengthening links between a diversity of other groups.

The project’s activities put Framework principles into practice at the local level by engaging new partners in the community process. Rather than turning to service providers to address the issues of people with mental illness, the communities that participated drew upon the resources of consumers themselves, their families and friends, generic community groups such as churches and service clubs, and other community members such as employers, landlords and businesspeople.

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Goal

The goal of the Inclusion project was:

• to shift the focus of selected CMHA Branches from a formal service delivery approach to a mental health promotion approach.

Objectives

The objectives of the project were:

• to promote at least three new partnerships among consumers, families, local decision-makers, CMHA Branches, and the broader community;
  
  
• to implement strategies in five different sites which promote integration into the natura lcommunity;

• to disseminate the results and Iearnings of the project throughout the CMHA infrastructure and to other groups concerned with mental health.

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Process

The challenge for the Inclusion sites was to make community organizations and resources, such as recreation centres and service clubs, more accessible to consumer/survivors. The approach was to bring together a range of partners in a community to work alongside the usual mental health stakeholders -- consumers, family members and service providers. Given this challenge, and building upon work that was already being done in the CMHA Branches, project staff, community members, and volunteers worked together to choose and implement their sites’ individual goals and strategies.

In the spirit of a true community development project, the focus and strategy selected in each site reflected the reality of that community, and its size, economy, population, facilities, resources, and history. The distinct strategies selected by the various sites were:

• increasing access to leisure and recreation services (Waterloo);
• community participatory theatre (Forest);
• increasing employment supports (Timmins);
• peer advocacy and expanding volunteer opportunities in generic community agencies (Cornwall);
• connecting people coming out of hospital with community supports and services to promote their recovery (Ottawa).

The process of moving from a service delivery framework to a community process model was neither smooth nor uneventful. Each of the sites had a different starting point and experienced different challenges in making the transition. As the participants themselves noted at the final meeting of all the sites, inclusion is not finished with the end of these specific projects -- there is always room to make our communities more welcoming and more diverse.

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Partners

The Inclusion in Community project was designed to develop partnerships in the sites were developed among consumer/survivors, families, CMHA staff, and community agencies. One of the primary goals of these partnerships was to encourage those groups not normally involved with mental health issues, like local citizen’s associations clubs, to be more proactive in involving and welcoming people with mental health problems.

Local partners were engaged through planning meetings held in each of the sites. At the initial meetings, the concepts and goals of the project were introduced to a wide variety of community members, in order to discuss potential directions for the project, as well as to mobilize community support and resources.

The sites used many personal and professional connections in order to achieve their goals. Some of the community partners who became involved in the project include: an Aboriginal women's support centre, several community colleges, a municipal housing authority, the Navy Veterans, the Presbyterian Church, and several local and federal political leaders.

Sources

A New Framework for Support for People with Serious Mental Health Problems. Trainor, j., Pomeroy, E., and Pape, B. Toronto: CMHA National, 1993.

Inclusion in Community: Building Capacity. Project Proposal to the Trillium Foundation. Pape, B. Toronto: CMHA National, 1996.

Inclusion in Community: Building Capacity. Final Report to the Trillium Foundation. Pape, B and McKee, H. Toronto: CMHA National, 1998.

Inclusion in Community: A Guide to Local Action. McKee, H. Toronto: CMHA National. 1998.

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Part 1: Program Outlines - Helping Skills >