Are you a care provider, activist, educator, or artist passionate about transforming how we understand and approach mental health? Are you interested in joining a growing community of visionaries working towards a more care-centered world? Have you felt drawn towards IDHA’s work, perhaps wondering how you can deepen your relationship to it?
On Tuesday, June 17 from 6-7:30 pm EST, IDHA is hosting a virtual membership “open house” as an opportunity to experience the power of our community firsthand, and learn more about membership. Being a member of IDHA means that you share our vision of transformative mental health, and align with our organizational principles and values. By becoming a member, you join a growing community of mental health change makers and gain access to a handful of exciting perks and opportunities.
The evening will feature an artist showcase and panel discussion featuring several current IDHA members, as well as share information about membership and different ways to get involved with our work. We especially encourage those who are curious and seeking to learn more about IDHA to join us.
Since launching membership nearly five years ago, we’ve seen our network grow in such inspiring ways. We would love to share this night with you, to celebrate how far we've come and make space to seed creative visions for our shared future.
Register in advance via Eventbrite to join. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about how to join.
Access
Automated closed captioning will be provided. The event will be recorded and shared with all registrants. Please email contact@idha-nyc.org with any other access needs or questions about accessibility.
Facilitators and Contributors
This space will be held by members of IDHA’s staff team and feature several of our members.
Staff
Nia Nelson (they/she)
Nia is IDHA's Administrative Coordinator. They are an organizer, health educator, artist and activist. They have organized in various cross-movement spaces, most notably at the intersections of Black and Queer liberation, mental health, Black spirituality and interfaith liberation theology. As a trauma survivor and person of Black and Filipino lineage, their lived experiences and innate gifts inform their unwavering commitment to building upon ancestral legacies of spiritual healing practices and colonial resistance. As a music curator, producer and herbalist, they also tenderly hold the healing, storytelling, and connective powers of music and the land close to them and incorporate them into their personal and community praxes.
Jessie Roth (she/her)
Jessie is IDHA's Director. She is a writer and activist organizing at the intersection of mental health and social justice. A longtime organizer with IDHA, she has supported the development of initiatives such as Mental Health Trialogue, a forum bridging peers, family members, and providers. Inspired by her family’s experiences with the mental health system, Jessie’s work is focused on the healing power of storytelling and the importance of cross-movement organizing for mental health liberation. Her writing has been published in the book We've Been Too Patient: An Anthology of Voices from Radical Mental Health, the Intima Journal of Narrative Medicine, and the Village Voice.
Members
Dan Armstrong (he/him)
Dan is a mad artist, peer supporter, and researcher living, working, and playing on the lands and waters of the Kwakwaka'wakw Nations on Northern Vancouver Island. Dan is currently adapting a series of plays about Mary Pengilly, Canada's first peer supporter, into a screenplay for a short fictional film. He is also developing a multidisciplinary gallery installation entitled So long, august which includes large scale drawings and writings describing his own experiences as a psychiatric survivor. Dan is passionate about developing a business plan to create a peer led respite center focused on the healing components of the arts, professional development, and housing sustainability for mad community
Beca Bayeh (she/her)
Beca is a researcher, artist, and clinical psychology student. She is specializing in neurodiversity-affirming care, and is passionate about neurodiversity and community-based research. Her work currently explores intersections between the Neurodiversity paradigm and Cultural Psychology, as well as college students’ mental health. Her clinical approach is informed by Feminist theory, the Social Model of Disability, and Decolonial Psychology. Before becoming a psychology trainee, she worked as a science communicator and a dance instructor.
Tish Buckholtz (she/her)
Tish is a parent and has a diverse cultural background and identifies as a queer, non-binary individual with experiences of mental health unwellness. As a survivor of suicide and various forms of abuse, Tish's life experiences and intersecting identities motivated their decision to become a Licensed Clinical Social Worker (LCSW) and EMDR therapist. They are focused on learning how to decolonize and decarcerate their practice. Tish came to IDHA a year and a half ago in hopes of building connections, partnerships, and gaining tangible strategies to radically transform mental health practices. Additionally, Tish organizes with HCW4Palestine and PSL in Houston, Texas, which is located on the occupied lands of the Coahuiltecan, Karankawa, Sana, and Ishak peoples.
Jessica Hirst (she/her)
Jessica was born in Virginia, USA, and graduated from Stanford Phi Beta Kappa in Earth Systems. She is an artist that creates performances, videos, installations and texts, sometimes all in the same project, and has had exhibitions, performances, projections, presentations, publications and residences in multiple countries including India, Thailand, Japan, Colombia, Chile, Mexico, Zimbabwe, and Senegal. Jessica’s work lives in the spaces between her and the world, around issues that include mental illness, psychiatric medications, and disability, capitalist realism, her positionality relative to the Middle East, American imperialism, the failures of binary thought, gender, and the climate crisis.
Jonathan Ng (he/they)
Jonathan is a queer, Chinese/Taishanese child of immigrants, settler on Lenapehoking, activist/community organizer, and liberatory therapist/life coach/healer. Their work in community mental health, peer mentorship, and HIV/AIDS has revealed to them the power and necessity of building systems/communities that actively resist the carceral dynamics of the current healthcare system. As a facilitator/holder of space, they center the embodiment of knowledge and teachings of BIPOC abolitionists, organizers, and past, present, and future ancestors in striving for a collective liberated future.