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From A Home to A Career
Rock-solid bottom line: I could never keep a job without mental health supportive housing. I can’t even imagine maintaining a viable employment search from a friend’s couch, a city shelter, or a preferred bench at Penn Station. It almost came down to shelters or train stations ten years ago....
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Housing and Employment, The Foundation for Recovery: Keeping the Focus in a Changing Environment
Across the country, conversations are taking place about integrated, community- based employment for individuals with disabilities. There are also conversations about housing individuals with disabilities in the community, in the least restrictive environment. Traditionally, issues of housing and...
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Creating Culture Change: NYC Tackles Housing and Employment
The New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (DOHMH), together with community partners and providers, is working to increase access to employment and affordable housing for all people with mental illnesses. Local governments, including health departments, are ideally positioned to...
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CPI’s Employment Resource Book – Designed to Help Consumers Achieve their Employment Goals
The Center for Practice Innovations (CPI) supports the New York State Office of Mental Health’s (OMH) mission to promote the widespread availability of evidence-based practices to improve mental health services, ensure accountability, and promote recovery-oriented outcomes for consumers and...
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Identifying Gaps in Employment and Vocational Supports
We must frame our services around the individual, not the individual framing themselves around a program. Perhaps that’s easier said than done. I offer the following insights into this topic and hope to stimulate your thoughts and perspective and perhaps provide a foundation for understanding on...
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The Keys to My Recovery: Stable Supportive Housing and Meaningful Employment
Depression is something I’ve not only experienced but witnessed all my life. It runs in my family. There’s a lot of abuse in my history, and, looking back, I can see clearly how and why I gravitated towards substance abuse, as an attempt to self-medicate. For as long as I can recall, I have...
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Seven Tips for Teaching More Effective Job Skills
After fifteen years of modestly fulfilling our mission of teaching Computer Job Skills and securing employment for over three-thousand persons diagnosed with mental and physical disabilities, I regret how little we knew. We had the passion and heart for the work, but we lacked the expertise to be...
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A Rainbow of Opportunities
Employment is an integral part of confidence building, hope, self-esteem, and an essential portion of the recovery from mental illness. In 1991, the Residential Services department of Saint Joseph’s Medical Center decided to pursue the development of a business which would provide vocational...
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Recovery and Employment Go Hand in Hand at Federation of Organizations
Employment and/or volunteer activities provide socially-recognized, valued roles that contribute to community integration and enhance and support the recovery process. Federation of Organizations has been employing consumers to deliver mental health services since 1981. By now 20-30% of our...
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The Economics of Recovery: Finding Your Voice
It had been a long day; half-a-dozen intake interviews with several Government benefit applications for SSA disability with the usual back-up documentation. I was drowning in paper. I’ve probably completed fifteen hundred applications for Government benefits in the past ten years. At this...
