Healthy Minds Initiative: Update to the Community

On November 2, 2006, the Capital District Mental Health Program posted an Update to the Community on the latest activities of the Healthy Minds Initiative. It is satisfying to note that access to services remains a high priority, as does the development of Community Resource Networks. Noticeably absent from the update was a summary of activities of the Healthy Minds Cooperative. Was this just a space issue in the Update, or has the Healthy Minds Initiative conveniently forgotten Criterion 10?

Criterion 10: We espouse a core set of Values & Principles that guide everything we do.

Our Values are:

• People First
• Responsibility To The Community
• Whatever We Do Is Based On Evidence

Our Principles are:

We espouse to:

• Share responsibility - every person is responsible to contribute to his or her own health and to that of our community.
• Meaningfully exercise (role model) our responsibility for our own health and that of our community.
• Build capacity to contribute, partner and create meaning as healthy citizens living in our community.
• Work with both health and illness.
• Build a coalition that is a resource to individuals and the community. This coalition will be jointly accountable with the community, building capacity within our ability to sponsor health, treat illness and support recovery.
• Value all forms of human knowledge and experience - individual and communal; subjective and objective - and recognize that human understanding can spring from intuition or from empirical evidence.
• Evaluate what we do and demonstrate it to be effective.