Published on October 15, 2024

Centered Organizational Accountability

How IDHA is Learning, Growing, and Changing

Amid an internal conflict that has impacted many in the IDHA community, our team has spent the past several months in deep reflection and dialogue to identify paths forward.

Firmly rooted in our principles and values – especially those of transparency, building trust and cultivating healthy relationships, and commitment to personal care and transformation – we are sharing these reflections publicly, with a focus on what we have learned and the tangible changes we are making.

Grounding in our history and vision

IDHA was created as a hub where people can gain new perspectives, knowledge, and skills related to transformative mental health. As a training institute, we bring together a variety of care providers, activists, survivors, and other advocates who are often at different points in their learning and unlearning journeys. We believe amplifying a wide diversity of perspectives is necessary to realize our vision for a world in which every person and community has the agency to choose how they understand and describe their experiences.

IDHA was born out of the mad pride and psychiatric survivors’ movements, which have historically been predominantly white spaces. Our own origins are rooted in white leadership, and in 2019, we made a public commitment to growing into an explicitly anti-racist, multi-racial organization – a journey we see as an ongoing process that requires constant examination of our programs, leadership, operations, and culture. In tandem with this effort, cross-movement organizing has become a crucial focal point of IDHA’s strategy in recent years, grounded in the understanding that we cannot talk about mental health without examining intersectional issues related to disability, police violence, housing, and more. We aim to bridge radical mental health movements and those organizing under umbrellas such as disability justice, healing justice, and abolition. We humbly consider ourselves students of these lineages, inspired by their values.

Our focus on bridging those working to bring change within and outside of the mental health system, and across social movements, means that disagreement within IDHA spaces is inevitable. Throughout our history, we have indeed faced many conflicts as an organization. Each of these has been an invitation to slow down, listen, reflect, assess, and improve our systems and processes. We center the importance of lived experience, holistic care, and learning and unlearning in our programs, and are just as committed to these practices internally. We deeply value feedback and generative dissent to grow and improve.

Taking accountability

Last fall, a conflict arose in IDHA’s Training Committee, a staff-led group of volunteers that supports our live virtual training series. For the past ten months, we have worked through internal channels to address this rupture with as much care and intention as possible, including bringing in external facilitators grounded in transformative justice values to facilitate a group repair process.

We acknowledge that aspects of IDHA’s systems, structures, and procedures were inadequate and contributed to harm experienced by members of our Training Committee. We take accountability for the impact of:

  • Underdeveloped conflict systems. As the Training Committee conflict escalated to require more support than IDHA’s existing systems could address, much of our response was developed in real time. Having clearer and more developed systems in place for our staff and volunteers could have aided in setting expectations and navigating this rupture in its early stages.

  • Insufficient power analysis. The Training Committee consisted of staff and volunteers, with inherent power dynamics shaped by differences in role and responsibility. It was also a predominantly white space, reflective of IDHA’s origins and that of the movements we grow out of. While the group engaged in power analysis in the early stages of conflict, there was not enough early and ongoing attention to how power played out in the group in relation to decision-making and identity. This allowed existing hierarchies to persist, reinforcing imbalances and limiting equitable collaboration.

  • The need to clearly define the scope and role of volunteers in our structure. For most of IDHA’s history, we operated without paid staff and relied on volunteers who generously offered their time to move our mission forward. We recognize that we are currently able to offer compensation for more roles that support our programs, particularly those that generate revenue, and need to be clearer with volunteers about the scope of their duties.

  • Overextended staff capacity. IDHA is run by a small team of three staff (two at the time of the initial conflict). In our early efforts to address this situation, we did not establish clear enough organizational boundaries, including guidelines for containers intended to address conflict. As a result, staff often took on too much, wearing multiple hats in efforts to resolve conflict. This led to staff burnout and highlighted gaps in our team’s skills to navigate these challenges effectively.

Growing and changing

Bringing people together across lines of difference has always been an inherent tension at the heart of IDHA’s work. As a non-profit, we also acknowledge the complexities of being part of the non-profit industrial complex and a radical social change ecosystem. We are dedicated to examining where oppressive dynamics may be unconsciously replicated within IDHA, being upfront about the limits posed by our structure, and challenging those limits whenever possible.

All of these tensions have become more pronounced as our audience has grown to include more perspectives, and as our political and social context has become more urgent and divisive. We recognize the rupture within the Training Committee as part of a larger context – both within IDHA and a broader landscape of individuals and organizations navigating conflict as they strive for a more liberated future, often in the face of significant personal and collective challenges.

In the spirit of learning and growing from this conflict, IDHA commits to making the following changes:

  • Conflict systems

    • Building out transformative justice-informed systems to address conflict, with a focus on expectation setting and centered accountability.

  • Anti-oppression

    • Mapping where/how power shows up in our structure, and engaging in intentional and concrete reorganization when imbalances are identified;

    • Reviewing our culture and surveying our audience to assess how IDHA is doing in relation to our goals to become an anti-racist/multi-racial organization;

    • Reexamining our principles and values and approach to partnerships/coalition building through an anti-oppressive lens, clarifying what it looks like for IDHA to put these into practice.

  • Structure and practices

    • Revising our organizational structure to distinguish/clarify responsibilities, expectations, and compensation of collaborators such as volunteers and faculty;

    • Clarifying IDHA’s lineages and current relationship to radical movements (e.g. abolition), particularly in the context of the people we platform as faculty.

  • Skills and capacity

    • Training staff and those in a facilitator capacity within IDHA in skills to acknowledge and navigate power imbalances, and address conflict;

    • Creating a new Board committee focused on conflict response, to support systems development and provide more consistent support to staff.

Moving forward

IDHA is a work in progress and will continue to learn from conflict to build a stronger organization. We extend gratitude to all in our community who hold us in loving accountability, and reaffirm our value of transparency in navigating this ongoing situation.

We value direct communication and generative dialogue about what we have shared here, and will create clear and purposeful containers for further exchange within our community about how IDHA is learning and growing. Our team is fiercely committed to IDHA’s evolution and improvement and looks forward to sharing substantive updates on these changes while continuing to build a more transformative mental health movement alongside all of you.

In Solidarity,

IDHA Staff & Board of Directors