Hi

One of the requirements of my contract is that I give periodic reports on the progress of the organizing for the Educational Retreat. This is the sixth one. Please note that this is an interpretive report, not minutes for the meeting.

1.   Website.  Documents related to the Educational Retreat are online.
2.   Agenda.  We met Thu. August 2^nd at M.H. Administration. Stephen, who is currently in Canada, was unavailable. Present were Almalicia, Luann Hahn (Administrative Services Manager), Tom, Barry, myself, and Nancy Pena. The agenda was:
   1.   MHCSCC
   2.   Participants & Facilitators
   3.   Feedback & Followup
   4.   Exit Instructions
   5.   Set Meeting Time(s)
3.   MHCSCC.  We spoke briefly to the last week’s creation of a Steering Committee for the Mental Health Clients of Santa Clara County (MHCSCC), the county client network. This network is organized to provide support for the clients working on reform of the local mental health system. Three of the Steering Committee members were present at today’s meeting (Barry, Almalicia, Tom). I brought this topic up because it’s one part of setting the politics of the Educational Retreat.
4.   Facilitators.  In this spirit, I suggested that we invite Michele Powers, of Gilroy, now the co-Chair of MHCSCC, to be a facilitator. Claudia Center was unable to come, due to a national DMDA schedule conflict. Walter Shwe accepted our invite. Thus we are replacing Annette and Agnes with Michele and Walter. In addition, Michele will give a “message from MHCSCC” at the closing of the program, after Nancy has finished with the discussion on “Vision and Plans.” After the meeting I met with Michele and confirmed her involvement as facilitator.
5.   Participants.  I went through the complete list of participant invites and we discussed the status of each. Most confirmed. Maryann Barry and Michael Meade of Adult Psychiatry declined. Acting Q.I. Manager Michael Ichinaga also declined; Nancy agreed to the suggestion of the Q.I. Department that Rob Leadbeater the Program Director [?] be his replacement, and this is now set. Simon Dominguez, the new Chair of the MHB, has not responded; face-to-face, he told me it’s his wife’s birthday that day. So I don’t know. We still aren’t sure about Florence Keller, the psychologist from Adult Psychiatry whom we are asking in as replacement. Sharon Roth, NAMI-Santa Clara Chair, may have to be late, while Lt. Brenda Herbert, SJPD, has an injury and will come if her medication regime permits. Wanda Alexander, the contractor for the Central County Self-Help Center, is as yet uncertain, due to travel plans. Nancy also asked that we invite Amor Santiago, the Director of ACCI (Asian Americans for Community Involvement, a nonprofit provider).
6.   Feedback.  I’ve been interviewing participants, telling them what to expect and listening to their issues. So far this has gone quite well. What we have to say is news, more or less, and they generally find it engaging. I found a lot of real people who, each after his/her own fashion, have an interest in mental health reform that works. Who are prepared to entertain, anyway, the theory & practice of a client-driven system. While ‘trauma of treatment’ is a sharp point, it is a text they’re generally willing to look at and try to work with.
7.   Followup.  This was a short meeting and this discussion was largely postponed. In a general way, there are in my view two categories of followup:
   1.   Immediate followup, which means doing presentations or workshops with different working groups, including (at least) the MHB, Systems of Care, Community Coalition, Contractors Ass’n, Stakeholders Group, SEIU 715 Union/Management Group, Institutional Services, MHCSCC.
   2.   Longterm followup, which means developing reorganizations of aspects of the system (such as direct outpatient services, community support, inpatient services) which would make the kind of moral statement reflecting client-driven services which we’d like to make. This could include Accountability Training for the client activists.
8.   Exit.  I presented a text on instructions at exit to the 2×2 group session, with questions for discussion therein. This elaborates on the module texts. We had an involved discussion about certain wordings, a fair amount of back-and-forth aimed at language that was respectful to the participants and did not mince words from the perspective of the clients on our committee. I won’t bore you with the details, suffice it that we worked through it and the results are there for you to see.

The next meeting is set for 9AM-11AM on Friday the 10^th. I can be reached for input at 408-793-6476.

Andrew Phelps