institute for the development of human arts

2023 Year in Review

2023 shed light on the inextricable link between personal and societal transformation. Amid mass disruption and crisis, the need to transcend individualized and medicalized conceptions of mental health has never been clearer. This work is inherently political, and we all have a responsibility to challenge and resist interconnected systems of oppression.

This year, IDHA reached thousands of people with liberatory mental health skills, strategies, and practices rooted in lived experience and multiple perspectives. Thanks to our work, a growing network of providers, survivors, peers, and activists are sharing transformative mental health knowledge, and putting it into practice in their own communities.

Organization

Dear IDHA Community,

These times are teeming with pain and grief. We are bearing witness to multiple genocides, escalating climate catastrophe, war, and destabilization. Meanwhile, psychiatric coercion is on the rise within the mental health system, forcing people experiencing oppression into services rather than address the roots of their traumas. All of these dynamics expose a crisis of disconnection on an unprecedented scale, disproportionately impacting those whose identities lie at the margins.

Together with IDHA’s Training Committee, the incredible collective of organizers that dreamed up our forthcoming virtual training series, I’ve spent much of this past year thinking about the antidotes to this mass disconnection — exploring what it looks like to repair and deepen connection within and between each other, our communities, and the Earth in pursuit of a more liberated future. Time and again, I am often struck by how often the IDHA community itself models the qualities that I know are necessary to usher in deeper interconnectedness and more reciprocity.

In trainings, we uplift forms of knowledge and knowing that live not just in our minds, but in our bodies. In community events, we wade into the unknown and embrace uncertainty. In panel conversations, we build bridges across movements, understanding that there is no path forward without an intersectional analysis. In membership gatherings, we practice “polyphony” by holding and validating multiple truths at the same time. In committee organizing, we lean into generative conflict and consider root causes of harm. And in all IDHA spaces, we interrogate expertise, valuing lived and embodied wisdom as highly as professional knowledge.

Every day, I am honored to experience the relationship building work within IDHA that creates the conditions to make healing and systems change more possible. I am very proud to present our 2023 year in review, which provides insight into all that we accomplished this year, with input from dozens of care workers, activists, survivors, artists, and other disruptors.

In the words of bell hooks, “My hope emerges from those places of struggle where I witness individuals positively transforming their lives and the world around them. Educating is a vocation rooted in hopefulness. As teachers we believe that learning is possible, that nothing can keep an open mind from seeking after knowledge and finding a way to know.”

Amid so much heaviness, this is a big part of why I still hold onto hope. I’m grateful you’re here, and look forward to building with you in 2024 and beyond.

In solidarity,

This year, IDHA continued to offer a wide array of accessible virtual education opportunities that uplift lived experience, and provide the opportunity for our audience to develop connections to a wide range of modalities and movements. After 3 years of development, we launched our foundational offering, the Transformative Mental Health Core Curriculum. We hosted the remaining sessions in our fall 2022-spring 2023 live virtual series, and adapted several former live offerings into “evergreen” self-paced courses on Mighty Networks in order to reach a wider audience.

Transformative Mental Health Core Curriculum

In 2023, IDHA launched our foundational offering, the Transformative Mental Health Core Curriculum. This training is a direct response to a system that primarily conceptualizes mental health as a brain disease, minimizing the multitude of other factors that impact our well-being such as trauma and oppression. Although mainstream practices have recently garnered more critique, when it comes to shifting practice, so much still needs to change in terms of what’s being taught.

To develop the curriculum’s content over the past several years, IDHA surveyed more than 50 community members to understand the needs, desires, and current frameworks of those who may be interested in enrolling in a curriculum of this nature. With support from the ACTS Lab at NYU, we also interviewed more than 20 survivors and activists to center those most impacted by the system and capture what providers really need to know in order to provide more humane and liberatory care.

After developing module and lesson outlines and inviting faculty, much of early 2023 was spent engaged in a robust video production process, conducted virtually to support a dispersed teaching faculty team of nearly 50 people. We worked with a video producer and editor to steer 110 video lessons through a multi-step process that included filming, editing, annotation, and uploading to our learning platform. The final curriculum consists of more than 20 hours of original video content, supplemented by embedded resources (academic articles, book chapters, poems, and zines), discussion questions to spur community discussion, in-depth resource and reference lists to aid ongoing learning and exploration, and a list of terms mentioned in each video.

The compiled list of terms led to the creation of IDHA’s Transformative Mental Health glossary – an essential accompaniment to the Core Curriculum that also stands on its own as a valuable transformative mental health resource. We also created a Core Curriculum workbook, which consists of journaling activities that invite participants to connect what they are learning in the curriculum to their personal life and work. A few months before opening enrollment for the curriculum, it was approved for 20 continuing education credits for psychologists, social workers, counselors, therapists, medical doctors, nurses, and New York certified peer specialists.

During the summer, the curriculum underwent a “beta test” to hone its functionality. We convened a group of 38 people who gained early access to the curriculum and moved through a nearly finalized version. The beta test provided an important opportunity to test the cohort groups that are unique to the Learning Experience format of the curriculum, with one participant noting: “It was so great hearing what my peers were thinking in response to the material. Learning, hearing from, and discussing it with folks who are learning alongside me is such a valuable and crucial way for me to digest the information, connect with resources, and challenge my own biases.” It also yielded extensive feedback on the video content, supplemental features, platform, and accessibility that fed into a final set of changes made to the curriculum before its public launch.

IDHA opened enrollment for the Core Curriculum in September with a detailed landing page and trailer. IDHA’s Director Jessie Roth and Program Coordinator Noah Gokul also joined Co-Founder Jazmine Russell for an episode of the DEPTH Work podcast about The Future of Mental Health Education. We launched a new virtual panel series called “Transformative Mental Health Talks” that will feature members of the Core Curriculum's teaching faculty team and dives into timely topics that intersect with transformative mental health. A first panel on September 18 brought together four faculty members to share how they practice a transformative approach to mental health that honors choice and authenticity; and have fostered community to bring about change in and outside the system, reflecting on the power of collectivity to support transformation.

We have been blown away by the response, with more than 150 people enrolled to date. Our initial 2 cohorts for the Learning Experience format filled up quickly, prompting us to add a third option to meet the demand. In the words of one participant: “This curriculum is truly ‘core’ in the sense that it really does take us into the heart of transformative mental health: the people making it happen. We get to learn directly from those who have been, and are, holding onto each other, and reaching out to bring us in, as they make systemic change, treat lived experience as the expertise is, and hold a vision of holistic care for all of us.”

Self-Paced Courses

Hosted on Mighty networks

3,680+

All-time enrollments

880+

enrollments this year

IDHA adapts our live trainings into self-paced offerings, enabling us to reach many more people nationally and globally. These offerings are “evergreen,” meaning they can be accessed and completed at the participant's leisure.

This year, we adapted two classes from the Crossroads of Crisis training series into self-paced modules. Both of these courses contain 2-3 hours of video content, exclusive readings and resources, a reference and resource list to aid ongoing learning, and access to discussion with a growing community of professionals and advocates:

• The Crisis Industry: How Capitalism, Cops, and Coercion Shape Care Today

• Shifting Mindset to Shift Practice: Visions for a Liberated Crisis Response

Amid ongoing state violence and oppression in the fall, IDHA decided to make the self-paced course Grounding in Grief available for free to anyone who is looking to engage in politicized learning and unlearning, embodiment, and ritual. This course helps guide through feeling into what has been lost, and what we might build in the future, if we can sit inside the power of grief — mourning this moment and resourcing ourselves. Nearly 400 people accessed this course between October and December.

Our self-paced course library now features a total of 17 offerings, with our team working to make other past live offerings available in this format. Anyone who enrolls in a self-paced course also receives immediate access to IDHA’s School for Transformative Mental Health on Mighty Networks, where they join a growing community of 2,200+ change makers sharing resources and engaging in generative dialogue. Since launching our self-paced courses in 2019, we have had more than 3,680 enrollments, a figure we only expect to grow in the coming years.

Crossroads of Crisis

Fall 2022-spring 2023

345+

Participants
trained in 2023

In Fall 2022, IDHA kicked off the training series Crossroads of Crisis: Dreams & Strategies for Collective Care. Our Training Committee was inspired by the word “crossroads” as a poignant synonym for “crisis,” seeing this moment as providing opportunity to transform what crisis is, and what care can look like. We wondered: What if we met a series of global inflection points with a vast spectrum of collective care tools and networks?

Building on former offerings Crisis as Catalyst (Fall 2021) and Cultivating Community (Spring 2022), this virtual training series sought to reimagine the crisis continuum – interrogating what crisis is, where it comes from, how to respond to it with curiosity and compassion, and the role of peers, providers, and communities. We grounded our learning in the voices of lived experience and approached the theme of crisis from multiple lenses and dimensions. Drawing inspiration and lessons from current community-based efforts, participants practiced how to disrupt paradigms of coercion, create personal codes of ethics, and attune to the needs of those we support in professional and nonprofessional roles.

The first two classes were hosted in late 2022, exploring the current state of crisis services and scrutinizing crisis response mindsets rooted in white supremacy culture. Between January and June of 2023, we hosted the subsequent six classes, which explored “alternative” responses to crisis, how to build more inclusive communities of care, paradigm shifting programs that are re-imagining crisis care, how to bridge personal values with professional ethics, and the power of resisting urgency in emergency responses. The series culminated with a lived experience showcase, uplifting three activists and organizers with the extensive embodied wisdom that accompanies experiences of trauma, distress, and crisis.

In feedback forms submitted after the classes, this series was particularly praised for the care that went into all aspects of the organizing, as well as the vulnerability of the faculty. In the words of one participant: “I appreciated the intentionality and openness from the instructors, and everyone's willingness to bring up un-formed thoughts and ideas.” The supplemental discussion groups that were facilitated one week after each live class by Training Committee organizers were also recognized for “holding valuable space to further explore the learnings.”

This series was the largest virtual offering from IDHA to date. Among the many takeaways, people learned about how to critically evaluate mental health services through an abolitionist lens, how white supremacy culture shows up in mainstream crisis response, non-carceral and peer-based approaches, strategies to center community safety, the power of informed consent, and the importance of community and self-preservation. One participant reflected, “It reminded me what I am doing well and also how I can continue to center lived experience. I am always being pushed to engage in self-reflexivity to ensure I am supporting the folks I work with the best I can, and to have more dialogue with others around this work.”

We offered 31 full or partial scholarships to the series, made possible thanks to the generous support of those who enrolled at the supporter rate, or otherwise donated to IDHA this year.

Topographies of (Dis)Connection

starting in 2024

In December, we opened registration for our 2024 training series, Topographies of (Dis)Connection: Re-membering Self, Community, and Land. This series has been in development since May, with Training Committee organizers focusing our collective inquiry on how we can chart place, connectivity, and belonging through transformative mental health while colonialism continues to sever us from our lands, lineages, and ways of healing. These themes grew only more relevant as our planning progressed, particularly amid the multiple ongoing genocides and struggles for liberation from colonial oppression worldwide, including in Palestine.

The series description poses a series of big and critical questions: As we face this pivotal crossroads of crisis, what is our “true north” as the Global South, its diasporas, and Indigenous peoples are continually forced to the frontlines? How will we dismantle colonial barriers to accessing care without erasing vital cultural boundaries? How will we create healing spaces that acknowledge the maps to wholeness that live in our bodies, our memories, our storytelling, and our dreams?

The Crossroads of Crisis series demonstrated the impact of a more expanded and ongoing training offering, which inspired the 8 classes that make up Topographies of (Dis)Connection. We hope this spacious learning and unlearning opportunity will not only equip people with new knowledge, skills, and understanding, but also facilitate the connections that are so inherent to the series themes.

Between January and August 2024, Topographies of (Dis)Connection seeks to repair and deepen connection within and between each other, our communities, and the Earth – uplifting healing approaches that align us on the path to liberation and the rematriation of community care. Together we will re-member and recenter care that resists separation and displacement. We will resource care providers and community members with tangible skills to center agency, interconnectedness, and deep listening to those most impacted – unlearning practices embedded within our harmful systems and ourselves. Drawing on lessons from across many movements, spiritualities, and disciplines, we will slow down and attune to our instruments of discernment: practicing connection, aliveness, and inner resourcing.

We look forward to embarking on this learning journey in the new year and invite you to join us, if you aren’t already signed up.

IDHA’s focus on community-building is rooted in valuing polyphony and multiple voices. Our community-building initiatives not only bolster our training offerings, but allow for more intimate spaces to share and normalize a culture of transformation. This year, we continued to host virtual community events as venues for critical dialogue and support among peers, clinicians, family members, activist, artists. We also further built out our membership program, uplifted curated resources during moments of need, and uplifted member perspectives on our blog.

800+

Event registrations

IDHA’s community events are low cost, have a low barrier to entry, help build our member base, and create an environment for shared learning. Our events drew an additional 800+ people in 2023, many of whom went on to take our training and remain deeply engaged in our community.

In March, Lived Experience Through Creative Process: Conversations on Mental Health and Artistic Practice showcased art by two IDHA members, Kim Wichera and Noah Gokul. Both shared creative work informed by topics of mental health, psychiatry, and their artistic practices, followed by a discussion about how art can shift power dynamics in psychiatry and mental health. Kim presented work about the transformational processes of mental health, and Noah presented visual art centered on the symbolism of the spiral.

In September, we hosted the first installment of IDHA’s new Transformative Mental Health Talks series. Rejuvenating our Practice, Redefining Care featured four members of the Core Curriculum’s teaching faculty team reflecting on what transformative mental health means to them and how they put it into practice. Amid rising disillusionment and burnout experienced by care providers, this event aimed to instill a feeling of hope and connection, reminding us that we are not alone and a more liberatory future is possible.

In November, licensed therapist and observer-disruptor oumou sylla joined us to facilitate an installment of Radical Mental Health First Aide: A Framework and Tool for Self and Community Care. Oumou created RMHFA to radically reimagine how care is accessed and co-created. This is a framework and tool designed to support us in decentering the medical model from the way we access care, support, love or whatever words your community uses. As we witnessed ongoing colonial violence and genocide, this workshop provided important avenues to increase our capacity for an ethics and practice of care rooted in consent and accountability. By building our toolkits, the practices of witnessing and care can become more sustainable.

In December, Political Uses of Mental Health Laws in the U.S. and Canada Today brought back two Decarcerating Care panelists from earlier in this year, Kelechi Ubozoh and Rob Wipond, to delve deeper into how we define and understand “political” uses of psychiatric detention and commitment powers in a contemporary North American context. Speaking from lived experience, Kelechi shared personal perspectives on psychiatric force. Grounded in ongoing journalistic work, Rob framed various ways of understanding “political” uses of force, historically and in the present day.

Membership

110+

new members

12

virtual gatherings

Membership is a core aspect of IDHA’s structure that enables us to grow our base, spread the lens of transformative mental health, and develop leadership in our community. Anyone who is aligned with our mission, vision, principles, and values may become a member. Membership is a special relationship with IDHA and comes with a handful of unique perks, such as being the first to know about upcoming programs, receiving discounts on trainings, and receiving our monthly member digest.

In May, we hosted a membership open house called Seeding Transformative Community, which invited members of the public to experience the power of our community firsthand. The evening featured an art showcase and panel discussion featuring several IDHA members, and shared information about membership and different ways to get involved with our work.

IDHA members have the opportunity to attend monthly virtual gatherings, which are lightly-facilitated spaces to connect with one another outside of more formal committee or organizing contexts. Each gathering centers on a theme suggested by a member or surfaced in the context of world events or current IDHA offerings, which in 2023 included intergenerational understandings of mental health, conflict as generative, loss and grief, time and nonlinearity, polyphony and holding multiple truths, collective liberation and transformative mental health, and the importance of space and place in healing.

We also continued to send out our monthly member digest, a curated newsletter that features upcoming IDHA programs, organizational updates, surveys and opportunities to shape our work, upcoming events in our wider ecosystem, and resources that members are sharing and engaging around on Mighty Networks. The member digest is also a place where we uplift IDHA-adjacent projects and events by our members and partner organizations. In 2023 this included episodes of co-founder Jazmine Russell’s DEPTH Work podcast, a survey on queer POC experiences of psychiatric hospitalization to inform research by Selima Jumarali, and event offerings by Sick in Quarters, a network of of which thai Lu is a founding member.

Members who organize within the Training Committee and Core Curriculum Committee also played an invaluable role in the projects described above, contributing to the ongoing development of the Core Curriculum and our live virtual training series.

Resource Sharing

IDHA maintains a library of essential resources (books, essay collections, films, poetry, and art) on our website to deepen our collective understanding of transformative mental health. In addition, we often curate supplemental resource lists in response to current events, when we discern that we have resources to offer that could be supportive.

In October, in the wake of ongoing colonial violence in Palestine and globally, IDHA created a new resource list on Decolonial Mental Health. The page opens with IDHA’s statement on transformative mental health and collective liberation, grounding in our founding principles and values of centering those most marginalized. It shares books, articles, and other resources to aid ongoing learning and unlearning at the intersections of mental health, disability, and colonialism. It also curates IDHA-specific offerings on this topic, including an educational resource shared on Instagram about decolonial and liberatory approaches to mental health. This post was directly inspired by lessons taught by Liberation Spring’s Anjali Nath Upadhyay within the Core Curriculum (to learn more about these topics, check out our brief interview with Anjali Nath Upadhyay).

As we continue push towards decolonial understandings of healing and pain, IDHA started a new educational series in collaboration with Board member Evan Auguste that draws upon work from Black and decolonial psychology to bring more visibility to the unseen wounds of colonial violence among occupied peoples. The first post in the series honors the work of Dr. Frantz Fanon and Dr. Ibrahim Makkawi to help us name the wounds of colonial and racialized oppression and articulate how we can challenge our commitments as care workers and healers to further the material project of liberation. The second post draws upon the work of scholars Linda James Myers and Devin Atallah to frame Palestinian families' seeds of hope.

Blog

The IDHA community contains a wealth of knowledge about a range of topics, including mental health, transformative justice, holistic healing, environmental justice, creativity, and more. As part of our commitment to elevate the voices of those most marginalized and impacted by the mental health system, our blog is a crucial space for us to spotlight the voices of people who make IDHA what it is. The blog seeks to magnify a wide range of perspectives on different topics, in turn representing the unique multiplicity and inclusiveness of IDHA’s approach. In 2023, we published the following posts:

1. Unlicensed: Radicalizing Continuing Education
   In this pod-blog, IDHA members Leah Pressman and Jay Stevens suggest that if we want to abolish the mental health industrial complex, we have to start with our education system and how we conceive of what is considered valid knowledge. They attempt to challenge the prevailing mandates of professionalized continuing education and name its harms, while uplifting the alternative: learning from the people most impacted by carceral mental health systems.

2. Antidotes to a Carceral System: Ysabel Garcia on Dismantling White Supremacy Culture in Crisis Work
   Ysabel Garcia was a faculty member in IDHA’s Crossroads of Crisis series. The second class, “Shifting Mindset to Shift Practice,” invited participants to scrutinize mindsets rooted in white supremacy culture, noticing how and where they show up, in order to shift practice. In this follow-up interview with IDHA Training Committee organizer, Frankie Dawis, Ysabel delves deeper into her perspective and expertise.

IDHA’s cross-movement organizing strategy seeks to bridge the silos in our broader social justice landscape and the transformative mental health movement. We organize panel events that respond to current and emerging issues at the intersections, elevate the voices of those with lived experience, and bring together a range of frontline organizers with a wealth of wisdom and range of perspectives.

Decarcerating Care

500+

people registered in 2023

11,600+

all-time views on youtube

IDHA organized our first-ever Decarcerating Care conversation in 2020, in the midst of ongoing racial uprisings in the United States. As activists called to divest funding from the police and some advocated for reallocation to mental health, IDHA sought to draw attention to the ways in which the mental health system maintains white supremacist, racial hierarchies and operates on logics of surveillance, coercion, and control. Since then, six panels have reached more than 11,600 people with urgent dialogue about anti-carceral crisis care rooted in the lived experience of service users, survivors, movement leaders, and disabled community members.

In April, the sixth installment, Histories of Coercion and Dreams for Liberated Futures explored how institutionalization has long operated as a tool of social control – disproportionately impacting BIPOC and disabled communities – manifesting today in the expansion of involuntary commitment directives nationally. A panel of activists, survivors, researchers, providers, and advocates explored the history and current status of involuntary commitment, reviewing key examples in New York and California. We were joined by James Burch, Theo Henderson, Chacku Mathai, Rob Wipond, and Kelechi Ubozoh for a critical converation moderated by IDHA member Tatyana Nduta.

The panelists spoke clearly and passionately about both the issues and potential solutions. One attendee reflected that “all of the speakers are excellent educators who shared their knowledge on this topic with passion and compassion. I learned about a lot of resources available on this topic, the laws that have been passed regarding forced treatment, and ways to call out inaccurate language used when it’s discussed in public.” Another shared that this conversation “made me aware of different ways that people become ensnared in the system. The data was helpful, as well as the incisive criticism that professionals need to tell the truth about forced treatment and negative impacts.”

In December, we hosted a follow-up community event with Rob and Kelechi to delve deeper into how we define and understand “political” uses of psychiatric detention and commitment powers. Due to widespread interest in the conversation, we uploaded an excerpt of the presentation to YouTube.

Palestinian Liberation: Lessons in Solidarity for Mental Health Providers

1,650+

people registered

In December, together with the Network to Advance Abolitionist Social Work and the USA-Palestine Mental Health Network, IDHA helped organize a panel discussion called Palestinian Liberation: Lessons in Solidarity for Mental Health Providers. This event brought together panelists Vivian Abouallol, Gina Ali, Roula Hajjar, Melody Li, Christine Schmidt, and Lara Sheehi to share their own strategies and skills for politicizing the therapeutic relationship in the context of this repressive moment. The event shared clinical approaches for supporting clients directly impacted by the ongoing genocide, addressed historical and racialized trauma, and helped connect the dots between mental health and collective care, and Palestinian and global liberation.

The event yielded more than 1,650 registrations and 700 live attendees. One attendee reflected, “it was wonderful to be in a space to learn new ways to unlearn the ways to challenge myself in this field." Another remarked that, “as a 'seasoned' clinician, my learning is usually held within formal CE settings or readings I choose. This felt like a real conversation and got to the heart of the work I want to be doing. This felt like decolonized learning and it was deeply appreciated and so necessary."

Since undertaking a robust organizational development process in 2019, IDHA has continued to hone the scope and structure our Board, staff, committees, and membership. In 2023, we clarified processes to support distributed decision making, and deepened team cohesion and sustainability. After transitioning out of fiscal sponsorship and becoming our own 501(c)3 in 2022, we strengthened internal systems to support our status as an independent organization.

Board

IDHA’s Board is made up of people with a wide range of experience and expertise to help us achieve our mission and vision, including mental health activism, community organizing, storytelling, transformative justice, financial literacy and management, strategic planning, marketing and communications, and conflict resolution. The role of our Board is to ensure that IDHA acts in accordance with our mission, as well as to govern, inspire, guide, advise, and function as a connector to resources. IDHA’s Board culture emphasizes creating space for polyphony, where all thoughts and voices are valued. We honor the slower decision making processes that are often necessary to yield meaningful results that benefit the Board and IDHA as a whole.

In 2023, following an intentional mapping of the current Board’s skills and strengths, we sought to add new members with particular expertise in fundraising and resource mobilization, anti-oppressive organizational development, and mental health research. All active members had the opportunity to nominate Board members via a Google form sent out in the member digest.

Evan Auguste and Sarah Napoli were welcomed onto the Board in the fall. Evan is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Massachusetts Boston. His identities as a Haitian-African American man have informed his work on examining how the U.S.’s history of anti-Blackness has shaped psychological realities both in and outside of the country’s borders. He is the director of the A.S.I.L.I. Collective, a research group whose work focuses broadly on addressing the mental health consequences of structural anti-Blackness through the lens of Black liberation psychology. Sarah is the learning services director at the Disability & Philanthropy Forum. From 2019-2023, she acted as the lead disability inclusion project officer within the people and culture Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity team at Open Society Foundations. She has over 20+ years of experience teaching and conducting training on social justice and advocacy. Learn more about Evan, Sarah, and the rest of the Board here.

Throughout the year, IDHA’s Board convened in regular virtual meetings to discuss IDHA’s current work and programs, future strategy, and sustainability. Members also continued to participate in Board committees, which this year included the Finance & Fundraising Committee and Anti-Oppression Committee.

Staff

IDHA’s work is powered by a small but mighty staff team, which in 2023 included Director Jessie Roth, Program Coordinator Noah Gokul, and Membership & Community Engagement Associate sun kim. Mid-year, we said goodbye to sun as they stepped out of a staff role and into membership to pursue work with youth as a film teacher. In a letter to IDHA membership announcing their transition out of this role, sun reflected, “I came to IDHA with so much grief in my questions of roots of trauma, reclaiming healing, and how cycles of interpersonal violence and harm are reverberations of systemic violence. IDHA felt like a home wide enough to hold these questions. I found my rage alchemized through our community offerings.”

The IDHA team is distributed and most of our work happens virtually on Zoom. This summer, however, we had the unique opportunity to co-work in person in Berlin, Germany. We filmed footage for the Core Curriculum trailer, mapped out processes for IDHA’s next strategic visioning process, and engaged in a series of generative brainstorms about our training and education work.

To close out the year, in addition to a period of reflection that informed this year in review report, IDHA staff participated in a dedicated reading week to catch up with books, articles, videos, and trainings related to our work from the wider transformative mental health ecosystem.

Internships

IDHA interns have the unique opportunity to gain knowledge in cutting-edge mental health alternatives, complementing what they are learning in their academic programs with lived experience perspectives and wisdom. Embedded within a wider community network, interns also forge connections and relationships with the many mental health workers, peers, artists, activists, and advocates that make up our community. Interns support a range of programmatic and operational responsibilities, gaining well-rounded experience with a small and rapidly growing mental health training institute.

In early 2023, IDHA continued to host our 2022-2023 social work interns from the Silberman School of Social Work and the Columbia School of Social Work, Tiana and Frankie. Tiana focused on Decarcerating Care and fundraising, while Frankie served as coordinator for the ongoing Crossroads of Crisis training series.

During the summer, we hosted two interns: Malkah from the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health and Grace from the Colin Powell School at the City University of New York. Malkah worked on self-paced course development and the Transformative Mental Health Core Curriculum, and Grace also supported the Core Curriculum, with an emphasis on marketing and outreach.

In the fall, we welcomed two new social work interns from Hunter and Columbia for the 2023-2024 academic year, Robyn and Jonathan. Robyn is the coordinator for the Topographies of (Dis)Connection series. Jonathan is supporting ongoing work with the Core Curriculum as well as fundraising.

IDHA’s strategy articulates our long-term priorities and areas of growth, while holding that our vision and project goals cannot be separated from who we are and how we come together as a community. As the period for our initial plan came to a close, we initiated a refreshed process for the period spanning 2024-2026.

Strategic Visioning

Back in 2020, IDHA initiated a robust process to develop our first-ever strategic plan. The process was led by co-founder Jazmine Russell, and built in many opportunities for input by volunteer organizers and the wider IDHA membership. The 2021-2023 Strategic Plan was formally approved by IDHA’s Board in April 2021.

In January 2023, Jazmine and IDHA’s Director Jessie Roth met to design a collaborative and distributed process to refresh the strategic plan for 2024-2026. A detailed survey was sent out to all members to help IDHA identify our unique strengths, what we're doing well, and where we should focus our energy in the next several years in order to realize the impact we seek in the world. A new Strategic Visioning Committee was created, consisting of staff, Board, and organizers within project committees to ensure that members and volunteers who have consistently shown up to support and contribute to our work have the opportunity to shape our work. The committee convened in a series of four meetings between the summer and fall, the agendas for which were directly shaped by the 23 responses to the member survey. The meetings focused on a SWOT and landscape analysis, review of existing programs and projects, and determining IDHA’s 3-year programmatic and organizational priorities.

Jessie and Jazmine are currently in the process of writing up the 2024-2026 strategic plan, which will be sent to the committee for one final round of feedback before it goes to IDHA’s Board for approval. It will ultimately be published on our website.

Anti Oppression

Central to IDHA’s organizational development has been a process of becoming an anti-oppressive organization. This work is ongoing, and IDHA is fiercely committed to all of the learning and unlearning that it entails. Our anti-oppression work spans anti-racism, disability justice, transformative justice and conflict work, as well as pricing accessibility.

This year, we ensured that all public programs had a robust focus on combating various forms of oppression, with an intersectional analysis. Partnerships with QTBIPOC-led organizations such as Vigilant Love helped IDHA reach more diverse audiences. Faculty and facilitators were nominated and invited with these leness in mind, also with a focus on representation of historically marginalized communities. For example, the faculty for the Core Curriculum includes more than 70% people with lived experience, more than 50% people of color, and more than 50% people who identify as queer, non-binary, or gender non-conforming.

We provided ASL interpretation and captioning for all programs, and mainstreamed the use of visual descriptions at the start of events. Ahead of launching the Core Curriculum, we equipped all videos with human-generated subtitles and separate downloadable transcripts, included visual descriptions at the start of all videos, and ensured that all readings and resources were screen-reader compliant. We provided 30 full or partial scholarships to the Crossroads of Crisis series, and 8 scholarships to the Core Curriculum.

In the context of ongoing organizational accountability work, IDHA staff received coaching from Spring Up, a worker co-op focused on understanding how we can create systems that actualize our values and build cultures of accountability. With support from Spring Up, we introduced a new harm response form in context of the Core Curriculum to allow people report harm that is directly tied to IDHA. This process will be rolled out organization-wide in 2024. Based on learning from a series of conflicts this year, we also started to develop a guide to support facilitators in how to discern and navigate conflict, disagreement, and harm in IDHA spaces.

The Anti-Oppression Committee of IDHA’s Board met bi-monthly throughout the year, focusing primarily on the development of future spaces within IDHA where members from similar racial backgrounds can come together to discuss the impact of racism, interrupt experiences of internalized racism, and deepen liberation work, as it relates to mental health and healing.

A large part of how IDHA grows and sustains our work is through effective communications and fundraising strategies. Our approach to both is deeply grassroots, with the goal of getting critical transformative mental health guidance and resources into the hands of a growing number practitioners and activists across the country and world.

This year, IDHA grew our audience on Instagram to more than 8,300 followers, alongside continuing to reach people through Facebook and Twitter. We saw success with creative communications and outreach efforts on social media, such as the use of video clips and pull quotes from classes, events, and blog posts to incentivize people to sign up for future offerings. We also hosted our second-ever Instagram Live this year, focused on Co-Optation in Cultures of Care.

We created more educational content than ever before in response to current events and visible conversations that intersect with transformative mental health. Among our most shared posts include Jordan Neely and the Fight for Mad Liberation, which summarized how mainstream media coverage of Jordan Neely’s murder perpetuated oppression and violence for those who identify as mad/disabled/mentally ill, and how to resist these harmful narratives to honor Jordan’s memory and fight for our collective liberation. In Pursuit of Decolonial, Liberatory Mental Health uplifted the work of luminaries within our movements (Dr. Franz Fanon and Dr. Ignacio Martin Baro) who situated their analysis and practice within an explicitly politicized and economic context, offering substantial critiques of imperialism and colonialism.

2023 also included a dedicated focus on collaborative communications. Throughout the summer and fall, we partnered with Vigilant Love to create a series of mini-guides to accompany their report Political Psychiatry: Mental Health Beyond Guantánamo, part of the #ServicesNotSurveillance campaign. The four-part series spanned a deep dive into political psychiatry, connections between mental health and the war on terror, strategies for care providers, and a guide to decarcerate the mental health professions. These posts garnered 700+ likes and were shared widely. We also launched the new educational series on the unseen wounds of colonial violence together with Evan Auguste, which can be viewed via the Decolonial Mental Health resource page.

This year, IDHA celebrated a handful of fundraising successes that enable our continued sustainability, including a record 47% of revenue from grassroots sources. This is part of our vision of becoming an increasingly community-sustained organization, growing income from “earned” sources such as trainings, events, and membership dues; as well as growing our individual donor base. A significant portion of this came from the recently-launched Core Curriculum, the revenue from which will allow us to continue to sustain the curriculum for years to come, and expand the number of cohorts we can offer in future cycles.

With the goal of growing individual giving, we launched a grassroots fundraising campaign in honor of our 7-year anniversary. The campaign celebrated how much we have accomplished since 2016, while calling in challenges in our landscape and the fact that IDHA's long-term sustainability is held in the arms of our community. We also continued to share the Equalizing Access Giving Circle as a vehicle to support our work while making transformative mental health education available to low-income community members who wouldn’t otherwise be able to participate. The Giving Circle directly funds training scholarships, subsidizes memberships, and contributes to honorarium for experts-by-experience, and raised more than $6,000 in 2023. In the words of one recent scholarship recipient: "Receiving a scholarship to attend IDHA's training series was the community care I needed. It allowed access to content and participants that deeply nourished my mind, filled my heart, and resonated with my soul. I feel more connected to, and at ease with, myself — and therefore, more comfortable creating a care plan that aligns with more fitting supports."

IDHA was also fortunate to receive a series of foundation grants, including a new multi-year grant that will significantly bolster our sustainability and growth. If you donated any amount to IDHA in 2023, thank you so much for your generous contribution. Your support plays a pivotal role in sustaining our work, and helps ensure the longevity of our radical vision for change.

 This year of impact would not have been possible without the following people:

Staff

Noah Gokul
sun kim
Jessie Roth

Board of Directors

Veronica Agard
Evan Auguste
Jacqui Johnson
Stefanie Lyn Kaufman-Mthimkhulu
Taina Laing
Sarah Napoli
Denise Ranaghan
Jazmine Russell
Jason Stevens

interns

Christiana Adebiyi
Grace Akinsulire
Robyn Cawley
Frankie Dawis
Jonathan Ng
Malkah Pinals

Training Committee

Ashi Arora
Robyn Cawley
Frankie Dawis
Jules Erdem
Carrie Flemming
Avery Gaeta
Rae Kurland
Rashida Latef
Steven Licardi
Jasmine Lin
thai Lu
Alex Mastny
Grace Ortez
Leah Pressman
miro sk
Stephanie Vander Lugt
Emily Verberg

core curriculum committee

Mel Butler
Seung-Wan Choi
Ben Cooley Hall
Jersey Cosantino
Selima Jumarali
Robyn Mourning
Jonathan Ng
Mayowa Obasaju
fii sperling
Kim Wichera
Christina Wusinich

2023 Faculty

Andres Acosta
Gina Ali
Allilsa Fernandez
Allyson Inez Ford
Tami Gatta
Amanda Hill
Dandelion Hill
Shanduke McPhatter
Cara Page
Aislinn Pulley
Susan Raffo
Jahmil Roberts
Jazmine Russell
Jason Sole

2023 Panelists and Event Facilitators

Vivian Abouallol
Gina Ali
James Burch
Noah Gokul
Roula Hajjar
Theo Henderson
Ji-Youn Kim
Melody Li
Chacku Mathai
Caroline Mazel-Carlton
Jacks McNamara
Vesper Moore
Christine Schmidt
Lara Sheehi
oumou sylla
Kelechi Ubozoh
Kim Wichera
Rob Wipond