WELCOME
From Jeanne Locher
It is my pleasure to welcome you to the Consumer Leadership Forum webpage. The Consumer Leadership Forum (CLF) is a coalition group of DC Mental Health Consumer Advocates. We are a mixed group of people, men and women, rich in ethnic diversity, strengths, vision, creativity, courage, and determination. We are bonded together by a common purpose, a common goal of wanting to reform our DC Mental Health System. Our ultimate goal is to create a system of compassionate care that is peer led, consumer driven based on a recovery model. Each and every one of us have a story to tell based on our own experience dealing with mental illness; based on our own experience dealing with the DC Mental Health System.
Each of us have wisdom to share as a result of this experience, and to lend insight about what is working, what is not working and what can we do as mental health advocates, as leaders in our mental health community, to advocate for change.
Each of us has experienced the stigma and pain associated with being diagnosed with a mental illness. It is time to put an end to this suffering. It is time to put an end to this discrimination. We, the members of the CLF, believe strongly that each and every one of us deserves to be treated with dignity and respect.
It is our collective responsibility as mental health advocates, as leaders in our mental health community to educate others about our own experience dealing with mental illness.
Always remember we are people first and foremost with hearts, minds, souls, interests, concerns, talents, gifts, hopes and dreams. We must learn to own the truth of our own experience and to use the wisdom of this experience to advocate for change.
It is of personal concern to me, many of us who have ended up in the system, have lost sense of our own personal power.
I assure you, the quickest, easiest way to reclaim your personal power is to simply decide, right here, right now, that:
I am going to take control of my own mental health;
I am going to take control of my own physical health;
I am going to take control of my own life;
I am going to take control of my own choices in life;
I am going to take control of fulfilling my own hopes and dreams;
I am going to take control of my own destiny in life.
We the members of the CLF seek to empower each other and our fellow consumers in our communities through education, advocacy, and outreach. We are in the process of talking about creating our own outreach teams, to go visit people, at their programs, throughout the city of Washington DC, to introduce ourselves, to tell them who we are, what we are about, what we are working on and to invite them to join us.
Our CLF began in January 2006 and has met ever since on a monthly basis. We have started several taskforces and now work in multiple coalitions with lawyers, other advocates and service providers who share our goals and visions of a reformed mental health system.
I would like to take a moment here to thank Galina Sergen, our project manager, for bringing us all together at the same table and for guiding our creative process together both individually and collectively over this past ten months of time.
We have tremendous power when we join together and discuss what we want and what we need and figure out just how the heck are we are going to get it. In our work groups, in our discussions, we are in a process of developing action plans to advocate for what we want.
I invite you to take some time to read through our newsletter and to share it with a friend. Inside you will find our mission statement, our vision statement, and a statement of our goals along with other interesting articles.
I personally invite you to join our Consumer Leadership Forum. I invite you to work with us. Let us together create a system of care that truly supports you and all of us who want to find a way to rebuild our lives.
