institute for the development of human arts

2022 Year in Review

We live in times laden with crisis. Simultaneously, these times present us with significant opportunities to transform what crisis is, and what care can look like. As more people grow aware of the injustices perpetuated by our current mental health system, we are seeing increased conversation about community, interdependence, and self-determination.

IDHA helped nurture these conversations in 2022, reaching thousands of people with cutting-edge knowledge and new perspectives. Thanks to our work, there is a vibrant and ever-growing network of professionals, peers, family members, and activists spreading transformative mental health around the country and world.

Organization

Dear IDHA Community,

It is an honor to share IDHA’s 2022 year in review with you. Putting together this recap has become one of my favorite annual traditions; I appreciate the opportunity lean into the reflective energy that the end-of-year brings, and to celebrate our collective wins in work that can often be extremely emotional and challenging.

As this report highlights, we are living in times laden with crisis. Multiple pandemics, the continued spread of fascism and settler colonialism, mass militarization and state violence, environmental degradation, and widespread economic decline. In New York City and across the country, we are seeing the proliferation of “care” ideologies that center force and control, with a focus on stabilizing, eradicating, and invisibilizing distress, rather than addressing the root causes that lead to houselessness and poverty.

Amid these challenges, however, there is — as is often the case — opportunity. More people than ever before are talking about a “mental health emergency,” with a growing dialogue about how healing is political. I have seen a growing thirst and curiosity for diverse frameworks and language to talk about distress and trauma. One thing I know is that we don’t need new solutions to these pervasive challenges; we already know the answers. Directly impacted communities, activists, and organizers have been doing this work for a very long time. I’m proud that IDHA exists to uplift these marginalized stories and voices through our trainings, events, and movement building conversations. I am proud to be part of a wider ecosystem that is advancing liberatory care practices in order to build a more compassionate world; a world that encourages everyone’s innate capacity to heal and offers a vast range of personal and collective healing practices that are available to all of us.

A few weeks ago, we organized a virtual festival & fundraiser to celebrate the IDHA community and help sustain our work into the future. It was a completely magical day, full of art, creativity, and vulnerability. The day was so special because of the sheer number of people who poured love, care, and intention into it — making this festival a microcosm of a larger organization that has been shaped and poured into by thousands of people over the last six years.

If you’re reading this, you’re part of the sea change of transformative mental health. It might take time, but the tiny changes and acts we perform every day feed into something far bigger than ourselves. It is powerful to witness. I am humbled to be part of it and grateful for your support and contributions.

In solidarity,

This year, IDHA continued to offer a wide array of accessible virtual education opportunities that uplift lived experience, and provide the opportunity for our audience to develop connections to a wide range of modalities and movements. We designed and hosted two training series (one of which is ongoing into 2023), and adapted many of our former live offerings into “evergreen” self-paced courses on Mighty Networks in order to reach a wider audience. We also made significant progress with our Transformative Mental Health Core Curriculum, which we look forward to sharing with the world in 2023.

Cultivating Community

Spring 2022

215+

Participants
trained

Between April and June, IDHA hosted our Spring 2022 semester, Cultivating Community: Creating the Conditions for Care. This series was rooted in the idea that in order for our most radical visions of healing to be realized, we must learn to be in relationship with one another in new ways, create shared commitments, and foster collective resistance. But in a society that frequently privileges individualism, we are rarely presented with the opportunity to practice building authentic connections in ways that can make us more adept healers and helpers.

Over the course of five sessions, we reached 215+ practitioners, providers, peers, artists, educators, researchers, family members, and other advocates with critical knowledge about the essential role of community, connection, and relationship in building care systems that center collective liberation. We explored how to create the conditions for community in a range of diverse settings; discussed community as a form of resistance to oppression; and introduced concrete approaches, tools, and strategies to foster community care in and outside of the formal mental health system.

To kick off the series, IDHA’s Training Committee authored its first-ever collaborative blog post, offering meditations and visions on what community means, why it matters, and how community care supports a transformative approach to mental health.

In feedback forms submitted after the classes, this series was particularly praised for the distinct but complementary perspectives featured by the faculty paired by our Training Committee. In the words of one participant: “Interesting contrast of facilitation in terms of a more academic perspective versus on-the-ground perspective, which complimented each other really well.”

Among the many takeaways from this series, people learned about the importance of encouraging and acknowledging expressions of loss, grief, and rage; the power of relationality in community organizing and mental health care; the shifts that are needed to embrace pleasure, joy, and satisfaction; and new language and strategies for identifying and addressing conflict.

We offered a record number of scholarships to this series (48), made possible thanks to the generous support of those who enrolled at the supporter rate, or otherwise donated to IDHA.

Crossroads of Crisis

Fall 2022-Spring 2023 (ongoing)

190+

Participants
trained
(to date)

In October, we launched our next training series: Crossroads of Crisis: Dreams & Strategies for Collective Care. IDHA’s Training Committee spent the entire summer visioning a series that was designed to meet the moment we are in — a moment that offers us a significant opportunity to transform what crisis is, and what care can look like. In particular, we were inspired by conversations that unfolded during the summer around 988, the new three-digit number for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline. Although 988 will undoubtedly play a role in making crisis services more accessible, it is only one small part of what will deliver on the promise of a system that centers the rights, dignity, agency, safety, and autonomy of those experiencing mental health crisis.

Our organizing circled around the finding that one synonym for crisis is “crossroads.” We asked: What could happen if our crises were widely understood not as a personal failure, but as a symptom of a world that is suffering? What if we met a series of global inflection points with a vast spectrum of collective care tools and networks? Another collaborate blog post by members of the Training Committee grappled with some of these questions.

Motivated by our collective agreement to “value the process as much as, if not more than, the outcome,” we made the decision to extend this series over the course of two seasons, giving it more time to breathe. The result was a series that seeks to reimagine the crisis continuum – interrogating what crisis is, where it comes from, how to respond to it with curiosity and compassion, and the role of providers and communities.

Building on our last two training series, Crisis as Catalyst (Fall 2021) and Cultivating Community (Spring 2022), we are grounding our learning in the voices of lived experience and approaching the theme of crisis from multiple lenses and dimensions. Drawing inspiration and lessons from current community-based efforts, we will practice how to disrupt paradigms of coercion, create personal codes of ethics, and attune to the needs of those we support in professional and nonprofessional roles.

The first two classes hosted in 2022 explored the current state of crisis services, tracing the ways that capitalism, carceral logics, and coercive interventions have created a minefield for people attempting to access care; and invited participants to scrutinize crisis response mindsets rooted in white supremacy culture, noticing how and where they show up, in order to shift practice. The series continues in 2023 with classes that will explore “alternative” responses, discuss how we can build communities to meet crisis, shine a light on paradigm shifting programs, consider how to bridge personal values with professional ethics, and uplift the power of resisting urgency in emergency responses. The series will culminate with a lived experience showcase, uplifting activists who have extensive embodied wisdom that accompanies experiences of trauma, distress, and crisis.

This series is also unique in that we are offering a series of optional discussion groups to further explore topics and themes brought up in each class. Facilitated by IDHA Training Committee organizers, the groups have been a powerful and appreciated complement to the main sessions. In the words of one participant: “It's so nice to have this space to continue processing and integrating the material from the main class. Thank you!”

Self-Paced Courses

Hosted on Mighty networks

2,800+

All-time enrollments

600+

enrollments this year

IDHA adapts our live trainings into self-paced offerings, enabling us to reach many more people nationally and globally. These offerings are “evergreen,” meaning they can be accessed and completed at the participant's leisure. This year, we adapted nine classes from our last two live training series into self-paced modules:

• Crisis as Catalyst: Grounding in Grief, Ancestral Healing, Transcending the Punishment Paradigm, Liberatory Art-Making, Making Sanctuary as Decolonial Practice

• Cultivating Community: Equalizing Power, Nourishing Relationships, Centered Belonging, Holding Difference

Each of these courses contains 2-3 hours of video content, exclusive readings and resources, a reference and resource list to aid ongoing learning, and access to discussion with a community of professionals and advocates. Both of these are available as “self-paced bundles,” with participants able to access the full series with a single click, and discounted enrollment.

Our self-paced course library now features a total of 15 offerings, with our team working to make other past live offerings available in this format. Anyone who enrolls in a self-paced course also receives immediate access to IDHA’s School for Transformative Mental Health on Mighty Networks, where they join a growing community of 1,400+ change makers sharing resources and engaging in generative dialogue. Since launching our self-paced courses in 2019, we have had more than 2,800 enrollments, a figure we hope to continue growing in the coming years.

Transformative Mental Health Core Curriculum

IDHA’s core offering is coming in 2023

In 2020, IDHA articulated a vision of developing a scalable and iterative mental health training model that proliferates rights-based, peer-centered, and holistic approaches to mental health with the goal of shifting dominant biomedical narratives toward a paradigm of polyphony, humanity, and care. Since then, we have been developing our “core offering,” — an in-depth, eight-week training that seeks to help fill a critical gap in the siloed movement for transformative mental health, bridging a range of stakeholders and amplifying an abundance of alternative tools and practices.

Building on work conducted between 2020-2021, this year we created a detailed outline of the curriculum, drawing upon a review of all IDHA trainings offered since our founding, and an analysis of the results of a community survey (50 respondents) and extensive lived experience interviews conducted in 2021 (23 interviewees). The outline underwent multiple stages of feedback, spanning members of IDHA’s Core Curriculum Committee, individuals nominated by the committee, the lived experience interviewees, and others in our community. We also conducted a thorough review of existing mental health trainings, surfacing further lessons regarding content and format. The final outline consists of 8 modules, and will introduce participants to a systemic, historical analysis, understanding how racism, classism, and other forms of oppression intersect with mental health; diverse narratives of lived experience; the history and impact of grassroots movements; a plethora of community-based practices that support healing on a personal, interpersonal, and community level; and how to apply a transformative mental health lens to one’s life and work.

Over the summer, we convened a series of Curriculum Development Groups (CDGs) to further build out content for each module, inviting individuals with a wide range of “expertise” to participate in dynamic virtual conversations. Our open definition of expertise was process- and content-oriented, inclusive of knowledge obtained through wide-ranging methods and experiences (centering lived experience), and with a critical lens. CDGs not only provided the unique opportunity to contribute to the development of the training, but also built community among individuals and groups working and organizing across multiple perspectives, movements, and disciplines. We solicited ongoing feedback from CDG participants on the process, content, and faculty nominations.

The rest of the year was spent finalizing and inviting the teaching faculty, and designing a robust remote video production process that would allow us to film dozens of faculty members from around the world. As we move through the final stage of the project, product creation, we look forward to sharing the Transformative Mental Health Core Curriculum with you in 2023.

IDHA’s focus on community-building is rooted in valuing polyphony and multiple voices. Our community-building initiatives not only bolster our training offerings, but allow for more intimate spaces to share and normalize a culture of transformation. This year, we continued to host community events as venues for critical dialogue and support among peers, clinicians, family members, activist, artists. We also further built out our membership program, uplifted curated resources during moments of need, and uplifted member perspectives on our blog.

300+

Event registrations

IDHA’s community events are low cost, have a low barrier to entry, help build our member base, and create an environment for shared learning. Our events attracted 300+ additional participants in 2022, many of whom went on to take our training and remain engaged in our community.

In July, we hosted our first collaborative community event in partnership with the Justice Arts Coalition. The Art of Grief: A Lived Experience Showcase was organized with the hope of transmuting our collective grief into new narratives that celebrate the power of mutual support and community action. In the lead up to the event, we launched a call for art, inviting our community to create art demonstrating the myriad shapes that grief can take, as well as the many ways that we can tend to our grief. We particularly sought to uplift the voices and experiences of those currently or formerly incarcerated in institutions (e.g. jails, prisons, psychiatric facilities, nursing homes, and group homes). During this event, ten artists or loved ones presented a curated selection of works, contributing to a powerful evening of creativity, solidarity, and connection.

In August, Age-Trauma & The Liberation of Childishness explored the effects of age-trauma on both personal and systemic levels, illuminating an underrepresented form of oppression with the goal of building a more care-filled world. In September, Transcending My Mental Health Degree: Radical Education and Unlearning gave IDHA’s summer interns the stage to explore how moments of rupture can be harnessed to facilitate mental health change, reflecting on how being part of IDHA has shaped how they think about mental health and reshaped their future plans. And in November, Mad Poetry and Art brought together poet/dancer Stephanie Heit and interdisciplinary artist Chanika Svetvilas to share work informed by their lived experience of mental health difference.

Membership

35+

new members

250+

TOTAL MEMBERS

Membership is a core element of IDHA’s structure that enables us to grow our base and spread the paradigm of transformative mental health and develop leadership in our community. Anyone who is aligned with our mission, vision, principles, and values may become a member. Membership is a special relationship with IDHA and comes with a handful of unique perks, such as being the first to know about upcoming programs, receiving discounts on trainings, and receiving our monthly Member Digest.

Members also have the opportunity to attend Membership Gatherings, which we hosted monthly in 2022. These are lightly-facilitated spaces for members to connect with one another outside of more formal committee or organizing contexts. Each gathering centers on a theme suggested by a member or surfaced in the context of world events or current IDHA offerings, such as the meaning of community, grief, expertise; the power and pitfalls of mental health research; cross movement organizing, including the intersections of transformative mental health and reproductive justice; autonomy and consent in crisis response; mental health as a political concept; and more.

We also continued to send out our monthly Member Digest, a curated newsletter that features upcoming IDHA programs, organizational updates, surveys and opportunities to shape our work, upcoming events in our wider ecosystem, and resources that members are sharing and engaging around on Mighty Networks. The Member Digest is also a place where we uplift IDHA-adjacent projects and events by our members and partner organizations. In 2022 this included a member supporting a music study exploring if music helps people who hear voices, a holistic mental health podcast created by our co-founder Jazmine Russell, and a therapeutic support group for mental health providers who also experience “mental illness.”

Members who organize within the Training Committee and Core Curriculum Committee also played an invaluable role in the projects described above, contributing to the ongoing development of our live virtual training series and the Core Curriculum.

Resource Sharing

IDHA maintains a library of essential resources (books, essay collections, films, poetry, and art) on our website to deepen our collective understanding of transformative mental health. In addition, we often curate supplemental resource lists in response to current events, when we discern that we have resources to offer that could be supportive.

In March, the DSM-5 announced the decision to add "prolonged grief disorder" as a mental health diagnosis, pathologizing experiences of grief that lasts longer than a year. At IDHA, we believe in moving beyond medicalizing frameworks, into understanding the complex individual, collective, and socio-economic layers to our grief. We sought to complicate and push back on the idea that these experiences be labeled “disorders” or “illness”, and offer multiple approaches to the topic of grief. We crowd sourced a list of community-sourced resources on the topic of grief, publishing this on our website alongside a self-paced course on grief and embodiment, and our open call to create art about grief. We also hosted our first-ever Instagram Live for a conversation, featuring Mangda Sengvanhpheng of BACII, and Stefanie Lyn Kaufman-Mthimkhulu of Project LETS, which sought to uplift different perspectives on the topic of grief and reflect on its recent medicalization by the APA.

In July, in the wake of ongoing conversations about 988, we identified an opportunity to talk more about what non-carceral mental health care can, and does, look like. Inspired by the resource sharing we saw to date, we updated and shared our own offering: the Decarcerating Care Resource Library. Since our first panel in September 2020, we've continued compiling resources about abolition across social movements, community care practices, policing and social work, rethinking suicide prevention, and more. Our list compiles readings, videos and podcasts, trainings and worksheets, terms and definitions, and organizations working at these intersections. We shared this resource in the hopes that it will help people in their journey to understand and practice liberatory mental health care, rooted in the rights and autonomy of those experiencing crisis.

Blog

The IDHA community contains a wealth of knowledge about a range of topics, including mental health, transformative justice, holistic healing, environmental justice, creativity, and more. As part of our commitment to elevate the voices of those most marginalized and impacted by the mental health system, our blog is a crucial space for us to spotlight the voices of people who make IDHA what it is. The blog seeks to magnify a wide range of perspectives on different topics, in turn representing the unique multiplicity and inclusiveness of IDHA’s approach. In 2022, we published the following four posts:

1. Does Sending Police to People in Mental Health Crisis Violate Disability Rights Laws?
   IDHA member Maia Gooddell writes about the case of Baraga v. City of New York, in which a series of plaintiffs and nonprofit groups challenge New York’s standard crisis response procedure as illegal disability discrimination, violating the ADA and other civil rights. Maia reflects, “I’d like to think New York City, where I live and work, is better than this. Our communities, our friends in crisis, and perhaps especially our police deserve better.”

2. Community Care and Transformative Mental Health
   Members of IDHA’s Training Committee reflect on the heels of the launch of our Spring 2022 series, Cultivating Community. Contributors shared: “community is a shared investment in the growth and development of what we love,” and being in community “ allows us to have conversations about what matters.” The creator of the collage muses that community is “a vast topic that conjures many different words and images, and remains a bit abstract in my mind’s eye.”

3. Gentleness as a Discipline: Anjali Nath Upadhyay on Liberation Psychology and the Politics of Care
   As a follow-up to the fourth installment of Decarcerating Care, Program Coordinator Noah Gokul interviews Anjali Nath Upadhyay. Our first-ever interview on the blog explores questions such as: How do you think about ethics in relation to community, professionalism, and mental health? What liberatory work can be done by those working inside the mental health system? In your experience building care alternatives, what have you tried that didn’t work? What did you learn?

4. Reflections on Transformative Approaches to Crisis
   Members of IDHA’s Training Committee reflect on the heels of the launch of our Fall 2022-Spring 2023 series, Crossroads of Crisis. Contributors write: “A transformative approach to crisis is rooted in radical imagination” and “systemic transformation of crisis care calls for courageous new voices, perspectives, and ideas.” In a poem contribution, another member muses: “perhaps a crisis is a crack.”

IDHA’s cross-movement organizing strategy seeks to bridge the silos in our broader social justice landscape and the transformative mental health movement. We organize panel events that respond to current and emerging issues at the intersections, elevate the voices of those with lived experience, and bring together a range of frontline organizers with a wealth of wisdom and range of perspectives.

Decarcerating Care

March and September 2022

1,300+

people registered in 2022

9,500+

all-time views on youtube

IDHA organized our first-ever Decarcerating Care conversation in September 2020, in the midst of ongoing racial uprisings in the United States and globally. As abolitionists and organizers called to divest funding from the police and some advocated for reallocation to mental health care, IDHA sought to draw attention to the ways in which the mental health care system maintains white supremacist, racial hierarchies and operates on logics of surveillance, coercion, and control. In the two years since, an ongoing series of panel conversations have reached thousands of people with urgent dialogue about alternatives to policing that are rooted in the lived experience of mental health service users and survivors, movement leaders, and disabled community members. We have discussed the importance of taking policing out of mental health crisis response, and the ways in which “reforms” uphold the ongoing coercion and control of marginalized communities.

In March, Decarcerating Care: Community-Based Healing Alternatives and How to Build Them sought to explore the ways in which white supremacy plays out in the mental health system and movement spaces, and how we can draw upon traditional knowledge and lived experience to create more accountable, effective, and healing-centered alternatives. We were honored to be joined by Aida Manduley, Vesper Moore, Yolo Akili Robinson, Gretchen Rohr, and Anjali Nath Upadhyay for this practical, solutions-oriented conversation.

In September, we started the Decarcerating Care lifecycle over. We reflected on the ways in which our landscape has intensified since the series began, bringing both new challenges and new opportunities to cultivate autonomy, self-determination, and liberation for those experiencing crisis and distress. The Evolution of Mental Health Surveillance examined how systems of surveillance intersect with mental health and disability by reviewing historical examples and exposing present-day iterations. Panelists Idil Abdillahi, Azza Altiraifi, Yana Calou, Talila "TL" Lewis, and Shawna Murray-Browne uplifted ongoing resistance efforts that respond to covert forms of control and prioritize community-based frames for safety.

Meanwhile, we continue to keep our Decarcerating Care Resource Library up to date. Our form also remains open to collect community perspectives on these issues.

IDHA has been intentionally developing our organizational structure since 2019, defining the scope and decision-making processes of our constituency groups. This year, we further developed our Board of Directors, staff, and approach to internships, with a focus on cultivating deeper team cohesion and sustainability. We also obtained independent 501(c)3 status, parting ways with our deeply appreciated fiscal sponsor FJC after five years.

Board

IDHA’s Board is made up of people with a wide range of experience and expertise to help us achieve our mission and vision, including mental health activism, community organizing, storytelling, transformative justice, financial literacy and management, strategic planning, marketing and communications, andconflict resolution.

The role of our Board is to ensure that IDHA acts in accordance with our mission, as well as to govern, inspire, guide, advise, and function as a connector to resources. IDHA’s Board culture emphasizes creating space for polyphony, where all thoughts and voices are valued. We honor the slower decision making processes that are often necessary to yield meaningful results that benefit the Board and IDHA as a whole.

This summer, members of IDHA’s Board and staff gathered for our first-ever retreat. We organized a hybrid experience, with some of the group gathering in the Hudson Valley, and others Zooming in from other parts of the world. Our goals for the retreat were to increase connection, deepen alignment, celebrate polyphony, and share information and future visions regarding IDHA’s programs, organizational design, and operations. We sought to balance “work” with ample time for breaks and getting to know each other – recognizing that a retreat that focuses solely on work is not a retreat at all. We also

celebrated the gifts and expertise of our group, with each person in attendance leading at least one session. It was a nourishing and generative weekend full of strategic discussions, workshops, community building, healing spaces, and skill shares.

Staff

Since our founding in 2016, IDHA’s work has been almost exclusively volunteer-powered. Between 2020-2021, small amounts of grant funding made it possible for us to compensate members of our leadership for some of their hours. This year, IDHA welcomed our first paid staff team. IDHA’s staff is responsible for ensuring that we meet our short and long-term strategic goals; our work maintains coherence and sustainability; and we remain true to our vision and collective values.

In March, longtime member, organizer, and Director Jessie Roth stepped into our first-ever full-time staff role, and we welcomed two part-time team members: Noah Gokul and sun kim. As Program Coordinator, Noah leads the development of IDHA’s core transformative mental health curriculum, as well as assists the design and implementation of live, virtual training semesters, and other educational offerings. As Membership & Communicate Engagement Associate, sun spotlights member expertise through community events and the IDHA blog, facilitates member gatherings, and develops leadership by identifying engaged members with the potential to become “organizers” in committees.

Internships

Internships at IDHA offer a unique opportunity to gain practical, real-world experience that complements classroom-based learning. Interns work closely with a range of activists and providers who are knowledgeable in alternative mental health, human rights, advocacy, community organizing, awareness-building, and much more.

This summer, IDHA hosted three interns from Adelphi University, two of whom focused on self-paced course development, and one of whom worked on IDHA’s forthcoming Core Curriculum. In the fall, we welcomed an undergraduate intern from NYU’s Gallatin School for Individualized Study, as well as social work interns from the Silberman School of Social Work at Hunter and the Columbia School of Social Work.

We organized two staff and intern “field trips” in New York City, including one to the Living Museum in Queens, and one to the Fountain House gallery in Manhattan. Reflecting on the experience of interning with IDHA, one intern wrote: “This has been a uniquely transformative experience in itself. I think being able to learn and share about mental healing in such a supportive and creative environment is the way to a less oppressive future, and it’s been a privilege to participate."

IDHA’s strategy articulates our long-term priorities and areas of growth, while holding that our vision and project goals cannot be separated from who we are and how we come together as a community.

Strategic Visioning

In 2021, IDHA finalized and approved our first multi-year strategic plan, the culmination of a robust and participatory process led by co-founder Jazmine Russell. The core purpose of our strategic plan is to communicate IDHA’s dynamic vision as well as a set of priorities to guide us for the coming years. The plan is “map” to help navigate all other aspects of our programs and operations, and was designed to be continuously referred back to, modified, re-examined, and adapted.

As part of this commitment, the strategic plan was consistently revisited and reviewed in 2022, and shared with our community to help achieve transparency and clarity on our work and strategic decision making. This included making the strategic plan a focus of a membership gathering early in the year, and sharing a graphic version of the plan on social media.

This year, IDHA’s Board and staff also grappled with important strategic considerations regarding IDHA’s future work, including our geographic reach and scope as it pertains to New York City, national, and international.

Anti Oppression

Central to IDHA’s organizational development has been a process of becoming an anti-oppressive organization. This is an ongoing process, and IDHA is fiercely committed to all of the learning and unlearning that it entails. This year, we expanded ASL interpretation and live captioning to all of our programs (live trainings, events, panel discussions), and continued to include these critical investment areas into our future budgets. All of our programs centered intersectional analyses of racism, classism, and ableism as they relate to mental health, and featured faculty members with intersectional identities. We also forged and deepened partnerships with organizations led by those from marginalized communities.

During the Board and staff retreat this summer, Program Coordinator Noah Gokul led us through a workshop to map IDHA’s anti-oppression journey, utilizing “the continuum of becoming an anti-racist, multicultural organization” to create plans furthering IDHA’s commitment to anti-racism. The goal of this exercise was to ensure members of our Board and staff are familiar with the organizational practices of an anti-racist, multi-cultural organization, and to map concrete actions IDHA can take to move closer to these practices in the years ahead. In another retreat session, Board member Stefanie Lyn Kaufman-Mthimkhulu also led a skill share to build access intimacy among our Board members, discuss the tensions of Disability Justice and capitalism (and more specifically the non-profit industrial complex), identify how (internalized) ableism shows up in this work, and move towards alignment and embodied practice with our collective values of Disability Justice.

Another core focus in 2022 was building out the process and structure for affinity groups at IDHA, which we anticipate rolling out in the context of membership next year. These will be spaces for IDHA members from similar racial backgrounds to share experiences, feelings, and struggles around systemic, interpersonal, and internalized racism as it relates to mental health and healing — while also learning from the wisdom, growth, and lived experience of their peers.

A large part of how IDHA grows and sustains our work is through effective communications and fundraising strategies. Our approach to both is deeply grassroots, with the goal of getting critical transformative mental health guidance and resources into the hands of a growing number practitioners and activists across the country and world.

This year, IDHA grew our audience on Instagram to more than 5,500 followers, alongside continuing to reach people through Facebook and Twitter. We saw success with creative communications and outreach efforts on social media, such as the use of video clips and pull quotes from classes, events, and blog posts to incentivize people to sign up for future offerings. We also created more educational content, boosting work by key people in our movement, notable media attention featuring transformative mental health concepts, and the growing prevalence of language that question dominant forms of care.

IDHA received a significant amount of attention this summer, when we made a post on social media about transformative mental health perspectives on 988 rooted in lived experience. We created this post with the hopes of educating our wider community about what 988 is, lineages of resistance to change the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, key current concerns with 988, and questions you can ask when evaluating a mental health service in order to center the voices of multiply marginalized folks (BIPOC, mad, mentally ill, disabled, and neurodivergent) who stand to be either most helped, or most harmed, by these interventions. Garnering nearly 3,000 likes, the post led to IDHA being featured in a USA Today article about what mental health activists are saying about 988. "988 is not a panacea," said Jessie Roth, IDHA’s Director. But educators want people to “have informed consent (and understand) what is possible and what outcomes can happen that often do lead to more harm or trauma,” said Stefanie Lyn Kaufman-Mthimkhulu, IDHA Board member.

The significant attention we received from our perspective around 988 contributed in part to our increased following on social media, and also helped inform our decision to shape some of our programs (e.g. the Crossroads of Crisis series) around these topics. Throughout the year, we continued to focus on how we could most effectively harness growing interest in conversations about mental health and crisis response to raise public consciousness at these intersections, centering lived experience.

This year, IDHA celebrated a handful of fundraising successes that enable our continued growth and sustainability, including raising more than 40% of our revenue from grassroots sources. This is part of our vision of becoming an increasingly community-sustained organization, growing income from “earned” sources such as trainings, events, and membership dues; as well as growing our individual donor base. Recognizing and appreciating the transformative value of foundation grants, we are aware that we operate in a volatile economic landscape, and remain committed to diversifying our revenue sources to guarantee that our work will continue long into the future.

In December, our virtual festival & fundraiser, Healing as Homecoming, generated $20,000 in revenue through the combination of ticket sales, raffle ticket purchases, and donations. The event featured workshops, member performances, a screening of the film Drunk on Too Much Life, panel discussions, team speeches, a powerful keynote speech by Dr. Jennifer Mullan, and the reveal of our art contest winner, whose design was featured on a 2022 limited edition IDHA tote bag.

During the festival, we also announced the Equalizing Access Giving Circle as a brand new vehicle for supporting transformative mental health through IDHA. Through the Giving Circle, individuals can make a recurring monthly donation to fund scholarships, subsidize memberships, and make transformative mental health education available to low-income and marginalized community members. This is a practical, justice-centered way to help shift dominant medicalized narratives toward a paradigm of polyphony, humanity, care, and support, and helps sustain IDHA’s work for the years to come.

If you donated any amount to IDHA in 2022, thank you so much for your generous contribution. Your support plays a pivotal role in sustaining our work, and helps ensure the longevity of our radical vision for change.

We are shocked and heartbroken that the Movement Lineages Panel hosted during our festival was the final time we would hear from Mother of the Movement and founding IDHA member, Celia Brown. We published the panel on YouTube in her honor. May we all to continue to transmit these lineages and histories to those entering the movement today, and those who will join the fight in the future. Rest in power and may her memory be a revolution.

 This year of impact would not have been possible without the following people:

Staff

Noah Gokul
sun kim
Jessie Roth

Board of Directors

Veronica Agard
Ana Florence
Jacqui Johnson
Stefanie Lyn Kaufman-Mthimkhulu
Taina Laing
Denise Ranaghan
Jazmine Russell
Jason Stevens

interns

Christiana Adebiyi
Rachel Corwin
Frankie Dawis
Jules Erdem
Giselle Pollack
Alex Purcell

Training Committee

Loa Beckenstein
Jason Bowen
Frankie Dawis
Jules Erdem
Carrie Flemming
Amy Howard
Rae Kurland
Rashida Latef
Grace Ortez
Leah Pressman
Stephanie Vander Lugt
Emily Verberg
Carmelle Wolfson

core curriculum committee

Christiana Adebiyi
Ben Cooley Hall
Lauren Gonzales
Selima Jumarali
Michelle Melles
Vesper Moore
Mayowa Obasaju
Giselle Pollack
Daniela Ravelli
Kim Wichera
Christina Wusinich

2022 Faculty

Ysabel Garcia
Ivelisse Gilestra
Stefanie Lyn Kaufman-Mthimkhulu
D.M. Marchand-Lafortune
Carlos Padrón
Leander Roth
Stas Schmiedt
Dawn Serra
B Stepp
Jess Stohlmann-Rainey
Kelechi Ubozoh
Kai Werder
Norma Wong

2022 Panelists and Event Facilitators

Idil Abdillahi
Azza Altiraifi
Yana Calou
Aiyana Goodfellow
Stephanie Heit
Talila "TL" Lewis
Aida Manduley
Vesper Moore
Shawna Murray-Browne
Yolo Akili Robinson
Gretchen Rohr
Chanika Svetvilas
Anjali Nath Upadhyay