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Institute for the Development of Human Arts
 

IDHA Strategic Plan

2021-2023


 
 


The Institute for the Development of Human Arts was founded in 2016 as a grassroots, community-based mental health training organization in New York City. This is IDHA’s first formal strategy, after operating on a project-by-project basis since our founding. The importance of developing a clear, unified strategic vision has continually emerged as we have grown in reach and scope.

The core purpose of this plan is to communicate IDHA’s dynamic vision, as well as a set of priorities to guide us for the next three years. We see the strategic plan as a “roadmap” to navigate all other aspects of our programs and operations. The plan touches, informs, and will be constantly referred back to develop and refine our structure and decision-making, transformation into an anti-racist organization, fundraising and resource mobilization efforts, conflict resolution, membership, and more.

 
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Our Mission and Vision


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Bringing transformative mental health education to all

Our mission

is to create opportunities for critical dialogue, mutual support, and advanced education and training for those within and outside the field. We aim to widely proliferate an understanding of transformative mental health that acknowledges and addresses the numerous contexts in which our mental health exists, understanding not only the role of personal traumatic experiences but also structural injustices and oppression that have deep historical roots in our society.

By bringing together experienced practitioners, leaders, and advocates, our courses and events uplift lived experience as highly as professional training. Our aim is to equip participants with essential knowledge that allows them to create and strengthen communities of practice around transformative mental health care wherever they may be.

We envision

a society that encourages people's innate capacity to heal and offers a vast range of personal and collective healing practices that are available for all.

 

The Context


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Systemic, Institutional, and Epistemic Oppression

The mental health system has a long history of reducing people’s suffering to mere biochemical diseases, while ignoring underlying and interconnected root causes, invisibilizing the harms of systemic oppression, and pathologizing its impacts. Colonialism, racism, poverty, disability, capitalism, and the wider medical industrial complex all contribute to mental health concerns, and simultaneously reduce access to a wider range of care options.

Reductionist Disease Model, Big Pharma, and Globalization

Despite its widespread implementation, the disease model of mental health has little evidence to demonstrate its effectiveness. For years, researchers and clinicians have asserted this is an unreliable way to assess mental health given the ways in which it erases the impacts of trauma and tells us little about the person, their community, and the support they need. This model is being exported globally, pathologizing the real roots of distress and undermining local healing systems.

Lack of Alternative Options

Hospital recidivism rates are high, punitive measures are common, and state authorities are often first responders to crisis. Current alternative approaches are limited and often re-traumatizing. Proposed “solutions” often re-create systems oppression and do little to listen to and support those in need. Therapy and community care are often afterthoughts to psychiatric treatment and medication while peer-centered and community-based supports are limited at best. 

The Gap IDHA Fills

Both public discourse and clinical training lack a robust understanding of the deep connection between personal and societal well being, as well as the existing frameworks, models, and alternatives that provide genuine support to those with mental health concerns. IDHA specifically addresses a gap in mental health education, providing a “transformative” lens that considers systemic factors, uplifts lived experience, and adopts a holistic perspective. Our aim is that people are able to freely choose for themselves how to understand their own mental health concerns, articulate the root causes, and pave their path for healing. IDHA is well positioned to bring together a variety of people dedicated to changing the mental health landscape. Dialogue across "roles" in mental health is crucial to an evolving understanding of transformation and collaborative learning.
 

Our Definitions


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IDHA seeks to advance a new paradigm around health and healing, giving language to a new wave of resistance. Our language and definitions are constantly evolving as we listen and learn together. For now, we've come to define Transformative Mental Health as the practice of personal and collective healing rooted in:

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Systemic Change

An understanding that healing requires a critical consciousness of multiple intersecting systems of oppression and the impact our society has on our bodies, minds, and communities.

Experiential Knowledge

A proliferation of our lived and embodied experiences as the most powerful form of knowledge creation. Best practices and trainings are created by or in direct collaboration with people who are labeled with mental health issues and those most impacted by trauma and harmful systems.

Holistic Care

Uplifting multiple voices and frameworks bring us closer to a full understanding of healing. Healing must go far beyond the absence of suffering, address the whole person and the broader context in which they live, focuses on uncovering the multiple roots of pain, and honor the vast range of human experience.

Transformative Mental Health is not a monolithic model, but an inclusive approach and collection of approaches that proliferate choice, polyphony, agency, and self-determination. It is a response to a system that purports to know what is best for an individual or community, rooted in professional knowledge and ideals.

 

Our Approach


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IDHA deploys three primary strategies to implement change. These strategies inform our projects and demonstrate how we intend to achieve our mission.

 
 

Education

Disseminating knowledge about transformative mental health frameworks, strategies, and tools

 

Project

Description

What This Looks Like In Practice

Live Semesters Twice per year, we offer a semester of live, virtual, courses that cover critical, timely, and socially relevant topics within transformative mental health frameworks and practice. IDHA’s spring 2021 training series, Psychologies of Liberation explored injustices in global mental health and presented grassroots, liberatory responses from around the world.
Self-Paced Course Library We offer a resource library of pre-recorded classes taught by world-class faculty. Students can access these classes at any time and move through the material at their own pace, while engaging with one another on our online community platform. IDHA’s inaugural self-paced class Rethinking Crisis provides 7 videos full of history, research, and unique perspectives; bonus articles; and access to a creative learning community where participants can continue asking questions and exploring the course content alongside their peers.
International Core Curriculum We are developing a core transformative mental health training that incorporates voices and approaches from outside the Global North into conversations about mental health and community care. To date, this project has surveyed 50+ community members on the most helpful and harmful aspects of mental health services, and conducted 25+ in-depth interviews with survivors and individuals with lived experience globally to inform our core curriculum.
Community Outreach Training We deliver transformative mental health trainings to partner organizations, universities, and nonprofits seeking support. Earlier this year, IDHA leadership provided training leaders in the field of holistic defense and access to justice on the carceral nature of mental health care and importance of listening to survivors.
 

Community Building

Creating spaces for critical dialogue and resource sharing

 

Project

Description

What This Looks Like in Practice

Community Events We create opportunities for critical dialogue and support for peers, clinicians, family members, activists, and artists that are open to the public. IDHA member-led community events have covered diverse topics such as confronting the history of mental health treatment using poetry, applications of harm reduction for mental health, and ancestral healing.
Resource Sharing We compile essential resources (books, essays, films, poetry, and art) to deepen our collective understanding of transformative mental health. We maintain a growing library of core transformative mental health resources, and put together bespoke compilations in response to urgent needs (e.g. the mental health impacts of systemic police violence).
Membership Platform Members of IDHA are invited to an online platform that allows them to share developments in the field, engage in ongoing dialogue, and learn from one another. IDHA’s School for Transformative Mental Health on Mighty Networks is a growing virtual community space to share resources, network, and enroll in self-paced courses.
 

Cross-Movement Organizing

BuildING bridges between movements dismantling all forms of oppression as they intersect with mental health

 

Project

Description

What This Looks Like In Practice

Panel Discussions & Campaigns We campaign to raise public awareness of the ways in which systems of oppression intersect with mental health; and forge partnerships to fuel intersectional, cross movement, change. Twice per year, we host a panel event to elevate the voices of those with lived experience and bring together a range of frontline organizers with a wealth of wisdom and perspective. IDHA’s ongoing Decarcerating Care discussion series seeks to advance a discussion of alternatives to policing and criminal justice that is rooted in the lived experience of mental health service users and survivors.
Movement Calendar We host a movement calendar on the IDHA website, which seeks to strengthen and unify the transformative mental health movement by cross-listing events by our peers and partners in one place. This calendar supports our goals to forge partnerships across movements and disciplines to fuel intersectional change. IDHA’s movement calendar lists events, classes, conferences, meetings, and support groups across diverse fields and movements such as prison abolition, disability justice, transformative justice, mad pride, land back, and more. See our movement map below for more.
 
 

 


Our Principles and Values


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Principles

Centering the most marginalized

Intersectionality

Equalizing access

Self-determination

Holistic transformation

Healing is a creative act

Health as a continuum

Values

Transparency

Equalizing power and resources

Building trust and cultivating healthy relationships

Commitment to personal care and transformation

Modeling our values

 
 

What We Don't Do

  1. We do not offer direct services, support groups, peer support, or mental health services
  2. We do not directly work on policy reform or legal action.
  3. We don’t assume we are experts.
  4. We do not aim to dictate what option, method, or framework is “best” for someone.
 

Our Programmatic Priorities


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Prior to this strategic visioning process, IDHA operated on a project-by-project basis. In light of our past five years of growth, we seek to adopt a more strategic approach to project planning. While we aim to carry the majority of our current projects into 2023, we also aim to be strategic about what these projects are leading toward and ensure we are continually honing our work to meet the needs and desires of our multi-stakeholder community. Over the next three years, we will prioritize the following across our programs:

 
 

Core Curriculum

Develop, hone, and pilot a core curriculum in transformative mental health that can be adapted to many audiences

Rationale

IDHA has introduced our audience to a diverse set of models and tools over the years, either through one-off trainings or limited series. Looking ahead, we seek to build off of and integrate what we have taught and learned to date into a cohesive, core transformative mental health curriculum that can be adapted to diverse audiences, nationally and internationally. A key part of our strategy is building a hub for change-makers to learn and grow together. Developing a space where ongoing learning is possible across core topics around transformative mental health would give us the opportunity to deepen our own and participants’ education.

Strategy

  • Draw upon content that has already been developed and offered to our audience through our past five years of training to identify foundational, introductory theories and practices

  • Survey target audience to determine best vehicles for content delivery (e.g. self-paced or live training), and to inform length/scope

  • Develop and refine core curriculum to be adapted to several key audiences

  • Develop training “tracks” that deepen understanding of a shared topic or interest in transformative mental health

Community-Based Training

Offer transformative mental health education directly to organizations and universities to expand our influence and develop leadership

Rationale

IDHA is increasingly invited to share our model and approach with organizations, conferences, universities, and other stakeholders. This type of “pop up training” has enormous potential for growth, both in terms of expanding our sphere of influence, but also in developing leadership among members and organizers to represent IDHA in these spaces. Over the coming years, we seek to hone a suite of core “pop up” community trainings (adapted from the core curricula above), which can be adapted to diverse audiences and contexts. We seek to train a team of IDHA organizers to provide this training, distributing our leadership and making it possible to share transformative mental health in a wide range of communities.

Strategy

  • Consolidate a suite of training offerings that can be tailored and offered to smaller audiences such as organizations and training programs

  • Develop a program and process to train up IDHA members and organizers to be able to deliver trainings in the community

Amplify Member Knowledge and Expertise

Continue to offer and create spaces for IDHA members to share their lived expertise and wisdom with one another, including events, the IDHA blog, and informal meetings

Rationale

IDHA's members are at the heart of our organization. This vibrant and growing community keeps us connected to, and rooted in, the voices of those who are most directly impacted by the problem we seek to solve, and who hold the power of leading us into a future where transformative mental health is possible and eventually fully realized. We strive to provide opportunities for members to share their expertise with one another, as well as with our wider audience.

 

Strategy

  • Continue to realize member-led event ideas using the community event proposal

  • Develop informal spaces for IDHA members to connect and 

  • Build out the IDHA blog with regular posts and perspectives from members spanning a range of topics, disciplines, and formats

  • Target more and mental health workers to attend trainings, become IDHA members, and ultimately grow into organizers to encourage diverse perspectives and critical dialogue

Grassroots Sensibility with Local Impact

Grow influence nationally and internationally, while supporting community-based hubs of transformative mental health

Strategy

At the time of this plan’s writing, concrete, short-term strategies have not yet been identified. This could manifest in a number of ways:

  • Pilot local program in another part of the country with significant representation of IDHA membership (e.g. Hudson Valley NY or California),

  • “Train the trainers” program that enables seasoned trainers to share their knowledge with others to further spread IDHA’s approach

  • IDHA membership “chapters” structure

We will only turn to building out this area if we fulfill our above priorities.

Rationale

IDHA was founded as a grassroots, community-based organization in New York City. As we have grown, so too has our geographic influence, and we now have an audience that spans the United States and many other countries as well. While we value the intimacy and cohesion that comes from focusing on our local community, the global resonance of our work is powerful and exciting. As IDHA grows, we seek to pair our “grassroots sensibility” with global impact.
 

Our Organizational Priorities


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Our programmatic goals and objectives would be entirely unsustainable without nurturing our organizational capacity and culture. 

 
 

Anti-Oppression

Growing into a vibrant, explicitly anti-racist and anti-oppressive organization that fosters liberation for everyone

Rationale

Since 2019, IDHA has drafted annual strategies and work plans to implement our values of equity and undoing oppression (spanning racism, classism, ableism, sanism, etc.) across our programs, leadership and operations, and culture and membership. This strategy was centered and updated throughout our strategic planning process. These objectives will continue to be reviewed on a regular basis, and annually updated with the understanding that anti-oppression work is an ongoing process, and we are fiercely committed to all of the learning and un-learning that it entails.

Strategy

  • Leadership and operations: Develop and support BIPOC leadership within IDHA (at the staff, board, working group, and membership levels), double down on our commitment to accessibility, offer disability justice training to staff and organizers, center anti-oppression and accessibility as key fundraising priorities.

  • Culture and membership: Create spaces for IDHA members to reflect on identity and privilege, address technology divides through pop-up training and resources, strengthen and iterate upon membership process.

  • Programs: Ensure at least 50% of our trainings and events have a discrete focus on anti-oppression, increase the number of BIPOC faculty and facilitators, continue to forge partnerships with queer and BIPOC organizations.

Sustainability

Ensuring that IDHA’s operating model is financially sustainable, and draws on a diversity of funding sources, especially growing grassroots support

Rationale

IDHA seeks to build a strong base of support that will both sustain current activities, and enable the future growth of the organization. We believe strongly in our mission and the efficacy of our approach to mental health systems change, and seek funding that will allow us the greatest flexibility and programmatic autonomy to respond to the challenges posed by the current and future landscape. All funding is intended to maximize the capacity of our team, and secure the greatest benefits for the organization as a whole.

Strategy

  • Diversify funding sources to lean less heavily on institutional funding sources that can inadvertently drive programmatic strategies, take capacity to maintain, and compromise the independence of our mission

  • Increase training, event, and membership revenue to become more grassroots-sustained

  • Grow a base of individual supporters

  • Develop a promotional strategy for our self-paced courses hosted on Mighty Networks

Structure and Culture

Honing an organizational structure and culture that encourages clear decision making, maximum impact, transparency, role clarity, and distributed power

Rationale

Having an organizational culture that supports our work is impossible without a structure that creates space for both distributed power, as well as clear roles and decision making. Realized through our year-long organizational structure process, IDHA aims to have the level of decision-making power equal to the amount of responsibility taken on, while acknowledging how issues of privilege, marginalization, and equity impact one’s ability to participate. This means being clear about the roles and responsibilities of each constituency, as well as who is responsible for moving projects of the organization forward at each stage. We aim to provide ample opportunities for members to initiate member-led activities, while ensuring that our structure supports the implementation of a wide range of organizational activities.

 

Strategy

  • Share and refer back often to IDHA’s organizational structure, which defines  roles and maps decision making power across groups

  • Resources permitting, add additional staff to support growth and sustainability  (future prioritized positions will support membership/community building and internal/external communications)

  • Foreground our core strategies for change and encouraging “IDHA adjacent” projects that don’t require oversight by staff, but can be amplified through our channels

  • Cultivate engaged board members who ensure our sustainability

  • Develop and utilize communication and conflict resolution processes, create opportunities for dialogue, and ensure clear processes for constructive and generated feedback

  • Create regular opportunities for co-reflection within IDHA, recognizing that we seek to put our principles into action with our own organizing, not just the knowledge we share with our audience

Grow Capacity

Growing IDHA’s organizational and programmatic capacity, tapping into a growing membership base

Strategy

  • Grow membership on Mighty Networks

  • Write and publicize the member-to-organizer journey and create leadership development opportunities (e.g. in working groups/project committees, through member-initiated initiatives and groups)

  • Build leadership within membership to support projects and organizational needs

  • Promote ways for members to propose and lead their own projects

Rationale

IDHA’s organizational and programmatic capacity have the potential to grow exponentially in relationship to new members and organizers who engage in our work. Developing leadership within members and offering the right support to engage new members is crucial to our sustainability.
 

Our Ecosystem


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Stakeholder Map

At present, a range of spaces and organizations exist to facilitate conversations among, and collaboration between, communities of psychiatric survivors, mental health advocates, and activists in aligned movements. These efforts are often fragmented and siloed from other spaces designed for mental health care professionals and family members, despite the potential for increased dialogue and understanding posed by collaboration. IDHA explicitly seeks to bridge this gap, bringing the following groups together on equal footing, and valuing lived experience as highly as professional expertise.

IDHA recognizes the significant overlaps among these identities, and seeks to particularly acknowledge those mental health professionals who also carry lived experience. These individuals are often forced to oscillate between identities depending on the space they are navigating, instead of integrating and celebrating both forms of knowledge as valid and crucial to supporting another through their healing journey.

We provide the visual below to demonstrate the stakeholder bridging aspect that is at the heart of IDHA’s work, while simultaneously, explicitly recognizing the limits of these stakeholder identities to meaningfully capture the actuality of any individual person’s knowledge or experience.

 

Mental Health Professionals

Psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers, peer specialists, somatic healers, and other professionals

People with Lived Experience

Current and prior service users, survivors of trauma and psychiatric abuse, and peers

Advocates

Family members, caregivers, activists, artists, teachers, and community members
 
 
 

Movement Map

Successful mental health organizing must look across systems and movements.

In an effort to identify key movements, intersections, and opportunities for collaboration, we created the below movement map that illustrates the many movements that influence, intersect with, and uplift Transformative Mental Health. This is by no means an exhaustive list, but can be used to track, guide, and give gratitude to our influences, as well as identify areas for future cross-movement collaboration over the next three years.

Model Map

There exists a plethora of frameworks and models for understanding mental health and mental difference to promote choice and possibility. The below map is also not exhaustive, and not intended to pass judgement on the various models that exist. It merely seeks to show the many frameworks that exist alongside the dominant disease model, and reveal IDHA’s vision to make many of these models known and accessible to the greater majority of people who would benefit greatly from having multiple options for healing and support. 

 

Our Process


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IDHA’s inaugural strategic planning process began in April 2020, guided by a desire to unify our collective vision, evaluate our work in light of this vision, and move into our future as an organization built upon our shared principles and values. The purpose of our strategic plan is to articulate IDHA’s long-term priorities and areas of growth. It is designed to be continuously referred back to, modified, re-examined, and adapted as we move forward with our work.

IDHA conducted our strategic visioning process during an uncertain and tumultuous time, defined by a prolonged global pandemic, surging police violence, the proliferation of white supremacist ideologies, deepening economic inequity, and a contentious U.S. election. These circumstances deeply impacted our internal processes and ways of organizing, and necessitated shifts to our strategies, programs, and tactics.

We sought for this process to be collaborative, adaptive, and ongoing – balanced with the understanding that decisions must be made, and imperfect action gives us more insight than speculation. We adopted an intentional approach to strategic visioning that recognizes the dynamic nature of the process, and the fact that our vision cannot be separated from who we are and how we come together as a community.

Process goals

  1. Create a dynamic vision and set of priorities that can guide IDHA’s work three years into the future

  2. Create a stronger sense of intimacy and community within the organization that models our vision

    IDHA Strategic visioning Process: Guiding Questions

  • How can we build an organization that is both impactful and sustainable?
  • How can we truly “live our values” through our goals, structure, and projects?
  • How can we practice anti-racism and unlearn/dismantle white supremacy through our leadership development, programming, and culture?
  • How can we build an organization that shares and distributes power, encourages leadership, and develops trust, while maintaining the structure, clarity, and accountability needed to move collectively towards our vision?
  • How can we ground our work in a vision of transformation rather than opposition?
  • What does it mean to be a “Transformative Mental Health” training institute?
  • What are our criteria for taking on and prioritizing projects?
  • What is IDHA’s relationship to the broader alternative/radical mental health movement, and other social movements throughout history?

    • Participation and collaboration

    This plan is the product of a ten-month process developed and led by IDHA co-founder Jazmine Russell, supported and informed by a group of 15 IDHA staff, board members, and organizers who formed the “Strategic Visioning Committee,” and with the support of external consultants. We provided regular opportunities for IDHA organizers to shape and support the process through bi-monthly meetings and quarterly questionnaires.

    To encourage participation from IDHA organizers who could not attend meetings, and build open feedback loops to inform our ongoing process, we sent out quarterly questionnaires to all organizers to solicit input on the design of the process itself, as well as key strategic priorities. The responses from these questionnaires not only informed strategic visioning meeting agendas, objectives, and goals, but also informed other interrelated areas of IDHA’s development (e.g. anti-oppression, conflict resolution, membership, fundraising, and structure).

    Implementation and follow up

    This plan will be reviewed bi-annually via strategic visioning meetings that bring together members of IDHA’s board, staff, and organizers. These meetings will be designed to surface and integrate feedback from IDHA’s broader membership community around the implementation of the goals set forth in this plan and to course correct as needed amid our evolving landscape.

    Do you have questions about this strategic plan, or our process? Email us at contact@idha-nyc.org