Cal Voices’ core mission reflects the concepts of client/family resiliency and recovery, incorporating these principles into all of our programs, services, and advocacy efforts. As a peer led advocacy agency, these are the philosophies most important to us and drive the work we do on a daily basis. Our entire team has extensive knowledge of wellness, recovery principles, possess lived experience of people living in recovery and infuse these ideals into their ongoing local and statewide advocacy efforts. For example, we were the first agency in California to hire a Consumer and Family advocate, dating back to 1996 as well as the first agency to hire and create the Patient’ Rights Advocacy position in California in 1987. Our team of recovery educators possesses the following skills: certified WRAP facilitation, Whole Health Action Management (WHAM) trainers, Trauma Informed Care educators, all while promoting the core concepts of recovery on a regular basis to policy makers, psychiatric staff, clinical staff, and community based agencies.

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Despite sound evidence challenging the traditional medical model of care for individuals with mental health disorders, it has taken decades for sincere belief in recovery to gain credibility in the medical community and California’s Public Mental Health System (PMHS). The movement sprung from a grassroots community of individuals who experienced recovery from a mental health condition themselves and began using their agency to help transform a broken system. In fact, the roots of the Recovery Movement occurred as a result of clients, patients, survivors becoming involved in their own treatment process, through self-advocacy and in turn discovering the power that peer support made in their lives. These victories in people’s lives all had something in common in that they were directed by the clients themselves. In short, the quintessential thread through all first-person narrative accounts of recovery is that services must be client directed in order to be recovery-oriented.

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On the most basic level, recovery-based services are those that place the client’s individual needs and preferences at the forefront of each and every treatment plan, not just in the array of programs offered, but in the ways in which these services are actually delivered.

 

Access the Mental Health America 2024 Mental Health Toolkit here: https://mhanational.org/mental-health-month/2024-toolkit-download

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