My Quarantine Challenges: Establishing a Community Mental Health Service Offering
The biggest change for me during the self-isolation imposed by COVID19 has been from other people being home so much more. I no longer feel like I'm missing out on anything by being home. To the contrary, there are simply more people available to connect with me virtually around things I've always wanted to connect with them around.
So for me the change isn't about losing anything other than a few dance classes (now done on videostream) and occasional meals with family members in other households. It has largely been a time of gain for me.
I was reading in this article on happiness how so much of happiness comes down to activity we feel makes a contribution to the lives of others and also lowering our requirements for satisfaction.
I would say that what I want most out of this quarantine time is more of a sense of making a contribution to the lives of others.
I've done a lot of that in the past. I've built an entire land trust community for Native Hawaiians, retrained former convicts for successful white collar careers, provided art therapy to traumatized children, taught meditation to incarcerated teens, and much more. But those things always involved a lot of time out and about. As an introvert, and really a homebody, I always had to do time-limited projects for that reason. There were only so many months I could take all that in-person contact.
Now in that so many new people have showed up in the online world for more of their lives, I find that I have new opportunities to serve....
My goal is to get a free community mental health service project going now that is online and have that continue even once people are able to spend more of their time out and about.
Goals with Dates
On the way to the larger goal of a successful online service project there will be several steps along the way that I would call sub-goals.
- Organize with others what service looks like and how to make governance decentralized (in case any one of us gets too sick for a period) - 4/11
- Plan how to make others aware it is freely offered (marketing) - 4/15
- Get more people to participate in providing the service so that it is mutual aid, not charity - 5/1
- Get the right technology set up for delivery - 5/1
- Train everyone who needs training - 5/15
- Start delivering services - 5/20
- Collect feedback - 7/1
- Meet with others to continue optimizing based on feedback - 7/15 and on
Progress Wanted
What I'm looking to see is that we can start delivering a service people find valuable within their day to day lives. It's not enough to just chart hours of service delivery, number of people signed up to give/receive, etc. The true metric is that people feel it is really helping and want to continue even once they have more in-person options available to them.
I'll be looking to see that I actually meet the above dates, or even progress more quickly, and that the feedback we collect at the end of 6 weeks in operation either confirms we're on the right track or provides clear guidance as to what achievable changes we need to make.
Individual Achievements
I'm just one part of this, so my individual achievement will be simply showing up and trying to move things forward. I've already done some research on other community models like this in the form of peer counseling, student-to-student counseling, and recovery counseling. I also previously had created an online platform called Phone Buddies Peer Counseling that matched people looking to offer compassionate listening with those needing someone to listen for 15 minutes.
I may see if I can revive some of that tech as the platform. It was a more organized way of addressing the matching than something like a Facebook group or Discord server would be. But maybe Discord. Anyway, figuring that out is a part of sub-goal #4, and something I need the others to participate in deciding.
Right now I have a zoom meeting scheduled for 2 days from now with a couple others who also want to do something for community mental health. We will start fleshing out what that will look like. As we do, this timeline may change because it has to reflect what we're co-creating. My individual achievement will be a factor of the group's goals and achievements.