Twenty-five years ago a group of people who had experienced serious mental illness came together to provide support to one another as they sought to heal themselves. That group organized and became On Our Own of Charlottesville, Virginia, a peer run organization. Through the years this community has endeavored to carry out its mission to "provide mutual support, self-help, advocacy and education, information, and referral services to individuals who have experienced significant problems in their lives due to a mental illness-and who acknowledge this; and to advocate for positive changes within the traditional mental health system." At different stages On Our Own has emphasized different aspects of this mission. The main thing OOO had done over its lifetime is to provide a community of mutual support among peers who join together to support one another on the path to recovery. Out of these relationships, which include a lot of careful and respectful listening, individual and group needs are identified, and plans are made and carried out to meet the various needs that members bring on their road to recovery and robust wellbeing. While this process has sometimes been highly structured and intentional, and at other times informal and less conscious, it has been the same core process that was reaffirmed over and over in different forms with different language and labels over the years: caring. This book shares the things On Our Own learned along the way. Its purpose is to help others form their own organizations, helping people with mental health challenges build caring places of community and mutual growth. In this book you will find tools to develop such an organization, along with a dose of On Our Own's history so that you might learn from its mistakes and successes as you create your own unique healing community.
Alice Anderson is the current President of the Board of Directors of On Our Own of Charlottesville. She brings experience to this work as a past Executive Director of Mental Health America Charlottesville-Albemarle and as a Presbyterian minister involved for over twenty years in mental health and homeless ministries. In that work, she served on dozens of nonprofit boards and developed skills in organization development and group facilitation. She holds a Master of Divinity specializing in social change and urban ministry. She also holds a Master of Arts in Teaching and has developed and delivered curriculum in numerous adult education settings. Dr. Georgeann Wilcoxson has worked in human and organization development over 40 years in inter- national, federal, state, and local governments as well
as nonprofits, corporations and small business. With a Ph.D. in Humanistic Education and Management, she developed innovative methodologies for applying family systems theory in large-scale organizations and was a pioneer in adult experiential learning. As a long time consumer of mental health services, she counts on her active membership in On Our Own to enrich her life in recovery and continuous growth. Between them, Anderson and Wilcoxson have
served as board president, secretary, treasurer, consultant
and Acting Executive Director of On Our Own Charlottesville. They have designed and led groups, facilitated strategic and operational planning, solved plumbing
emergencies, taken people to the hospital, helped invent new programs, represented OOO with community partners, overseen and made building repairs and written grant proposals and many reports. It has been a great privilege and pleasure for them in the writing of this book to be given the opportunity to expand, deepen, and consolidate the lessons learned by the community of On Our Own and its many dedicated partners. Should you wish to reach them, they can be found at: Anderson Wilcoxson Associates. Providing organization design and development with a systems approach, helping people develop agreement about what they want to do and what everyone needs to do to make it happen. We've worked at local, state, national and international levels at nonprofit, for profit, and governmental organizations, large and small, for over 40 years. 407 Key West Drive, Charlottesville, VA 22911 (434) 295-6029 aliceva1@aol.com, gwilcoxs1@aol.com
