Addressing the Social Determinants of Health in Program, Payment, and Policy: Extrapolating the Triple Aim for Population Health

There is much more to being healthy than traditional health care. In fact, “health care” is a surprisingly minor factor in health and the prevention of premature death, just 10 percent. Social circumstances, environmental exposures, genetic predisposition, and personal behavior combined...

Building a Quality Behavioral Health Workforce: Employing Service-User Perspectives Throughout Your Organization

With the introduction of Managed Behavioral Health Care in October of 2015 and the soon to be implemented Home and Community Based Services (HCBS), engagement of “peers” in the workforce has become a topic of considerable interest. HCBS introduces peer support as a Medicaid billable service...

Embracing Harm Reduction

Many of the people we serve in supportive housing use drugs and alcohol; some in ways that disrupt their lives. That is a fact. Behavior change is hard. That is a truism, and a fact. It is our job as supportive housing providers to serve people who may have struggled for most of their lives with...

Peer Training and Empowerment at the Howie the Harp Advocacy Center: Keeping Pace with a Bigger, Stronger Peer Movement

Without meaning to stretch the analogy too far, there was perhaps something rather apt—albeit unfortunate—about the 17th Annual Howie the Harp Advocacy Center (HTH) Graduation Ceremony being delayed three months because of Hurricane Sandy. It was originally scheduled for October 29, 2012, the...

Parachute NYC: A New Approach for Individuals Experiencing Psychiatric Crises

Think back to the last time you had a really bad day. One that even now you shudder to recall—a day characterized, perhaps, by heartache, or disappointment, or loss. Or even physical pain. A day you were glad to get to the end of, which left a mark on you somehow, and which you hope never to...

On the Shoulders of Giants: The Path to Building Supportive Housing

It was the summer of 1979, July 5th to be exact, the first day of my internship at Community Access. My job was to help run a pair of tenement buildings with 44 apartments that provided cheap homes to poor families and single men and women who had been recently discharged from state psychiatric...

The Spectrum of Healing: Housing, Recovery, Learning, Working

First and foremost, Community Access is an organization that provides safe, stable housing for individuals with psychiatric disabilities and working families. We’ve always recognized the fundamental importance of putting roofs over heads, and of giving people the chance—for many, for the first...