institute for the development of human arts

2025 Year in Review

2025 underscored the importance of deep connection and sustained relationships in transforming mental health. Amid escalating political violence and expanding carceral approaches to care, it is increasingly clear that survival under systems not designed for our well-being requires one another. We need collective care that makes space for grief, honors our interconnectedness, and reminds us that our struggles and liberation are bound together.

This year, IDHA continued to cultivate the knowledge, skills, and relationships needed to shape the future of care. Our work is part of a larger effort to imagine and build the worlds our communities deserve – not just respond to the systems that harm us. We bring together providers, activists, survivors, and artists to exchange perspectives, deepen their practice, and experiment with new healing approaches. In a year of reflection and grounding, we looked to our histories to carry forward the lessons that will guide what comes next.

Organization

Dear IDHA Community,

The practice of creating IDHA’s year in review always presents a welcome opportunity to pause, reflect, and take in all that a year can hold. This year, we are writing amid an intentional leadership transition that unfolded across 2025 and completed in early 2026. It feels meaningful to frame this report jointly, as we mark a year that held so much change for IDHA and for the world around us.

IDHA’s work is inseparable from the broader landscape we are living within. We continue to work and organize in impossible conditions, with mounting attacks on mad, disabled, and unhoused communities, including the expansion of carceral approaches to mental health. These dynamics are not new, but they are intensifying – reminding us of what our communities have long known: systems alone will not keep us safe, and our survival depends on one another.

This year also reaffirmed the importance of community care and mutual aid. These are not abstract ideals, but daily practices: small, steady acts that gesture toward the futures we are working to create. This is the heart of transformative mental health: caring for one another as we work to transform the world around us.

Within this context, IDHA is one meaningful place of practice. In our trainings, events, and membership gatherings, people come together to ask difficult questions, exchange perspectives, and explore new ways of relating to care and to one another. We witness how learning takes root in action and how relationships become the foundation for transformation. We are honored to be one place where people can cultivate the tools and connections needed to shape a more liberated future.

In many ways, 2025 was a year of integration for IDHA. It invited us to take stock and carry forward all that we have learned in the nine years since our founding. In doing so, it helped prepare us for this period of leadership transition – rooting us in our values as we step into a new chapter.

Looking ahead, we remain committed to supporting the development of grassroots care infrastructure rooted in choice, autonomy, and self-determination – equipping our community with the tools, relationships, and frameworks to build and sustain these efforts, while also navigating and challenging the systems that harm us. We know this work is long-term and requires sustained commitment, and we are grateful to be in it alongside all of you.

In solidarity,

This year, IDHA continued to offer a range of accessible virtual training opportunities that uplift lived experience and bring people into relationship with liberatory approaches to mental health. In the second year of implementing the Core Curriculum, we reached hundreds more participants through both self-paced and cohort-based formats, while continuing to deepen the Learning Experience model as a site of community-based learning and leadership development. We expanded our self-paced course library through ongoing adaptation of past offerings and introduced new live programming that responded to the complexity of the current moment.

Transformative Mental Health Core Curriculum

Building on the launch of our foundational training in late 2023, 2025 marked the second full year of implementing the Transformative Mental Health Core Curriculum. Over the past two years, the curriculum has continued to evolve as a central offering within IDHA’s work – serving as both a site of learning and a space of practice for those seeking to reimagine mental health care.

In 2025, we reached more than 205 participants through the curriculum’s two formats: Self-Paced and Learning Experience. Engagement was evenly distributed, with 51% joining the Learning Experience and 49% participating in the Self-Paced format, reflecting a balance between flexible, self-directed learning and cohort-based engagement. We also offered our highest number of cohorts to date, with 8 groups convened across the year.

The Learning Experience format continues to be supported by a facilitation model that builds leadership within the IDHA community. Members serve as cohort facilitators, guiding small groups through the curriculum and helping to cultivate spaces rooted in IDHA’s values. This work is anchored within the Core Curriculum Working Group, which serves as a home for facilitators to deepen their practice, reflect collectively, and shape the ongoing evolution of the model. As one facilitator shared, “I feel like I’m a much better facilitator and human being from spending time in this space. Working Group memories are a bright spot in my life.”

In 2025, we undertook the first comprehensive refresh of the curriculum’s content. Drawing on an extensive analysis of participant feedback collected since the curriculum’s launch, we identified opportunities to update existing lessons and develop new content to ensure the curriculum remains responsive to an evolving landscape. Our review surfaced key themes, including a desire for greater clarity and specificity in foundational concepts, deeper engagement with research and evidence, expanded representation across faculty and perspectives, and more applied guidance for navigating tensions within existing systems. While the bulk of this work took place in 2025, updated content began rolling out in early 2026.

Alongside content updates, we initiated a focused effort to strengthen the cohort-based Learning Experience format. We partnered with a user experience consultant to deepen our understanding of how participants navigate the curriculum, identify barriers to engagement, and lay the groundwork for both immediate improvements and longer-term enhancements. This work included a review of participant surveys, curriculum materials, and the Mighty Networks platform. In response, we implemented several improvements to better support participant engagement. These included updates to the Mighty Networks navigation to make the cohort space more intuitive and accessible, as well as new practices to foster shared ownership within cohorts. Through experiments such as “cohort contributions,” participants were invited to help shape group norms and take on more active roles in sustaining the learning environment.

To support outreach during seasonal open enrollment periods, we continued to host our Transformative Mental Health Talks series. In February, we hosted Global Solidarity for Liberatory Care, convening activists, clinicians, and advocates to explore strategies for shifting the global mental health paradigm toward rights, dignity, autonomy, and collective care. In August, we experimented with a new, more practice-oriented format through Sustaining Care Beyond Systems, an interactive event developed in response to community feedback calling for more opportunities to put transformative mental health into practice. The event combined a grounding panel with breakout workshops on topics such as mad histories and futures, voice hearing as a community ecosystem, and facing contradiction.

To expand awareness of the curriculum, we continued to share snippets of the content in more accessible, widely distributed formats through a series of educational posts on Instagram. These posts explored topics such as embodied transformation, global organizing for mental health liberation, mad liberation, and putting transformative care into practice. Many of these were developed in collaboration with faculty, helping to extend their reach into new networks and further amplify the co-created nature of the curriculum.

Accessibility remained a core priority. In 2025, 49% of enrollments were at the lower access to wealth tier, and we granted 15 scholarships. We remain committed to sustaining our tiered pricing model to ensure that the curriculum is accessible to people across a range of economic circumstances, made possible by those who enroll at the higher access to wealth tier.

The Core Curriculum continues to play an important role within the broader movement for transformative mental health, offering participants both language and practice to navigate and challenge dominant systems. Across feedback, participants consistently highlighted the integration of lived experience, critical analysis, and practical application. As one participant reflected, “it feels like I've come home to a group of like-minded people committed to transformation of the mental health system.” Another shared, “this is one of the only times that CE content felt actually relevant to the systemic and political factors involved in mental health work.” These reflections point to the curriculum’s growing role not only as a training, but as a space that helps participants feel less isolated, more resourced, and more connected to a wider ecosystem of people working toward mental health liberation.

Self-Paced Courses

Hosted on Mighty networks

4,160+

All-time enrollments

230+

enrollments this year

IDHA adapts our live trainings into self-paced courses, enabling us to reach a broader audience over time. These offerings are designed to be evergreen, allowing participants to engage with the material at their own pace while still accessing the depth and rigor of IDHA’s programming. Across all self-paced offerings, participants receive access to two to three (or more) hours of video content per course, along with curated readings, robust reference and resource lists, and entry into IDHA’s virtual learning community on Mighty Networks. These components are designed to support both immediate learning and ongoing engagement, allowing participants to continue deepening their understanding beyond the course itself.

In 2025, as part of an ongoing effort to adapt recordings from our archives, we finished adapting the Psychologies of Liberation series – originally offered live in 2021 – and made it available as a bundle. The four courses in this series explore injustices in global mental health, challenge dominant narratives, and highlight grassroots, liberatory responses from around the world: Unsettling Global Mental Health, Global Grassroots Responses, Applications of Two-Eyed Seeing, and Mutual Accompaniment and the Liberation of Psychology.

We also launched a self-paced adaptation of the Mad Studies Symposium, originally hosted live in December 2024. This course includes over five hours of video content drawn from the live event, featuring more than 20 talks from activists, scholars, clinicians, and artists across disciplines, movements, and geographies. Grounded in the field of mad studies, the course explores key contributions to rethinking mental health care, including the role of complexity and meaning-making, the importance of art and storytelling, and the connections between mad activism and broader movements for social justice.

Our Self-Paced Course Library now features 28 offerings. 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 3,600+ change makers sharing resources and engaging in generative dialogue. Since launching our self-paced courses in 2019, we have had 4,160+ enrollments, a figure we only expect to grow in the coming years.

Tending the Future of Care

Summer 2025

275+

Participants
trained

Between June and September 2025, IDHA offered Tending the Future of Care: Practices & Possibilities for Transformative Mental Health, a five-part live virtual training series for those interested in reshaping what mental health care can look like at the edge of collapse – and committed to building a more liberatory future together. Designed for a broad audience that included clinicians, activists, peers, educators, family members, and others navigating questions of care from different vantage points, the series offered grounding, practical tools, and opportunities for connection amid a deeply strained landscape.

In approaching the planning of this series, we sought to meet a moment of polycrisis without treating it as entirely new, grounding participants in lessons from history while inviting them to imagine new possibilities for the future. The classes were shaped by a set of pressing questions: What kinds of tools, frameworks, and practices might help people navigate moral complexity, burnout, and the expanding reach of carceral mental health systems? And how can IDHA continue to bring different audiences together – those newer to these ideas as well as those already deeply engaged – while offering content that is both accessible and substantive?

Faculty invited participants to grapple with complexity, contradiction, and uncertainty in mental health work while exploring more liberatory ways of relating, responding, and practicing. Classes examined topics such as complexity theory and liberatory mental health practice; the tensions radical providers face between resistance and complicity; the limits of the biomedical model; the politics of nervous system discourse; and the possibilities of relational healing approaches such as open dialogue.

We received more than 275 registrations, more than half of which were for the full series. Participants represented a range of relationships to mental health, with particularly strong participation from peers and people with lived experience, therapists and counselors, activists, healers and caregivers, artists, educators, and family members. More than half of registrants were training with IDHA for the first time, suggesting that the series helped extend our reach to new audiences while remaining resonant with those already connected to our work.

Feedback reflected strong appreciation for both the content and facilitation. Participants praised the grounded, personable, and collaborative teaching styles of faculty, as well as the balance of theory, storytelling, reflection, and practical insight. Many noted that the sessions felt timely and relevant, offering language for tensions they were already grappling with while creating space for nuance and complexity without demanding certainty or easy answers. As one participant shared, the series offered “substantive strategies and practical ways to co-create a more loving, healing world for us all,” while another reflected, “I am not alone!” Others highlighted the participatory nature of the sessions, the richness of small group dialogue and chat discussion, and the way faculty modeled openness, humility, and relational practice in real time.

The series also surfaced an ongoing desire for more spaces that offer both practical application and deeper processing time – an important reminder that many in our community are seeking not only critique, but support in how to live and act differently within challenging and continually escalating conditions. This tension is central to the purpose of the series. At a time when many care workers are stretched thin and dominant systems offer few meaningful answers, Tending the Future of Care created a space to replenish, reconnect, and collectively explore what it means to practice care in ways that are more humane, values-aligned, and responsive to the realities of our time.

IDHA’s approach to community-building is rooted in valuing polyphony and creating spaces where multiple voices, perspectives, and ways of knowing can be in dialogue. This year, we hosted community events, facilitated member-led gatherings, and shared resources to create opportunities for people to connect across difference, engage urgent questions, and build relationships grounded in a shared commitment to transformative mental health.

720+

Event registrations

IDHA’s community events are designed to be low cost and low barrier to entry, creating accessible spaces for shared learning, connection, and engagement with transformative mental health. In 2025, our events drew more than 720 participants, many of whom went on to engage more deeply with IDHA through classes, membership, and ongoing community participation.

As mentioned above, throughout the year we hosted two installments of our Transformative Mental Health Talks series, Global Solidarity for Liberatory Care and Sustaining Care Beyond Systems. These events offered accessible entry points into key themes within the Core Curriculum while fostering dialogue across diverse audiences.

In May and July, we hosted two virtual, interactive, member-led events. Language, Power & Meaning Making: Demystifying What Gets Called ‘Mental Illness’, facilitated by Al Galves, challenged dominant biomedical narratives of mental health and invited participants to explore distress as a meaningful response to lived conditions rather than as individual pathology. Feedback highlighted the event’s structure, facilitation, and the opportunity to engage complex ideas in the community. Participants appreciated the balance of content and connection, with one sharing that the event offered “a generative mix of new content and connection,” and another noting the value of being in a space where “we can explore these ideas freely.”

Choosing Life in a Time of Death, facilitated by Renya Neonorton, created space to grapple with grief, dystopia, and the challenge of imagining and choosing life amidst ongoing harm. Through reflection, dialogue, and creative visioning, participants were invited to mourn, connect, and imagine alternative futures grounded in care and interdependence. Feedback emphasized the depth of connection fostered through small group dialogue and the intentionality of the space. Participants described feeling “more strongly connected to the practices and relationships that give me life” and highlighted the importance of having space for grief alongside hope and action.

In August, we hosted an in-person screening and community conversation for the film Where Olive Trees Weep in partnership with the Foundation for Community Psychoanalysis in downtown Brooklyn. The event included a screening of the film – exploring life under Israeli occupation and the intersections of colonization, trauma, and resilience – followed by a facilitated group discussion focused on solidarity, witnessing, and collective care. The evening also included opportunities for grounding, grief processing, and resource sharing, as well as an altar space for reflection. This event reflected IDHA’s ongoing commitment to connecting mental health work with broader intersectional struggles for liberation.

Across all events, feedback underscored the importance of spaces that are not only intellectually engaging, but also relational and participatory. Participants highlighted the value of being able to engage in dialogue with others, reflect on shared challenges, and access language and practices that resonate with their lived experiences. These gatherings continue to serve as important entry points into IDHA’s broader ecosystem – offering accessible ways for people to connect, learn, and deepen their engagement with transformative mental health.

Membership

75+

new members

11

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 range of unique opportunities, such as being the first to hear about upcoming programs, receiving discounts on trainings, joining our monthly member digest, and participating in member gatherings, orientations, and Working Groups.

In June, we hosted a virtual membership open house as an invitation for those curious about IDHA to deepen their connection with the organization and experience the power of the community firsthand. The evening featured an artist showcase, a panel discussion with current members, and information about membership and different ways to get involved with our work. Building on this effort to support new members beyond initial entry points, we also developed a Membership Handbook in response to feedback about onboarding and pathways for engagement. This resource was designed to help new and existing members more easily navigate IDHA’s structure, understand opportunities for involvement, and identify ways to participate in community life, serving as both an introduction and an ongoing reference point.

IDHA members also had the opportunity to attend monthly virtual gatherings, which are lightly facilitated spaces to connect outside of more formal organizing contexts. Each gathering centered on a theme suggested by members or surfaced in response to the broader political and mental health landscape. In 2025, these included building solidarity for collective healing, navigating power dynamics in transformative mental health, and community care in the face of increased coercion. As attendance grew throughout the year, we extended the length of gatherings from 75 to 90 minutes. Participants shared that these gatherings offered a rare opportunity for open, vulnerable dialogue that grounded members in a sense of not being alone and created space to reflect on complex questions in community. Gatherings continue to serve as one of the most meaningful spaces within IDHA, offering members a place to feel resourced and in ongoing relationship with a broader movement.

We also continued to send out our monthly Member Digest, a curated newsletter that features upcoming IDHA programs, organizational updates, and offerings from our wider ecosystem. The digest is an important way that staff stay connected with members, especially those who may not be able to attend gatherings regularly, and many members shared that it helps them stay informed and feel connected even when they are unable to participate in live events. It also serves as a space to uplift IDHA-adjacent projects and perspectives from within the community.

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 lists in response to current events when we discern that we have materials to offer that could be supportive.

This year, we continued an ongoing collaborative educational series with Evan Auguste that draws upon work from Black and decolonial psychology to bring more visibility to the unseen wounds of colonial violence. The fifth post draws upon the work of Dr. Bobby Wright to examine the concept of Mentacide – the systematic psychological assault on Black consciousness through state violence and institutionalized neglect – and to name strategies for resistance grounded in political education and collective consciousness. The sixth post draws upon Dr. Amos Wilson’s concept of the “falsification of consciousness” to examine how propaganda, historical erasure, and disinformation shape public perception and manufacture consent for violence, calling for a reclaiming of political discernment as a liberatory practice. All installments of the series are housed on our Decolonial Mental Health page to support broader access.

In July, we created a collaborative resource titled Centering Culture and Care in Occupied Palestine in partnership with the Network to Advance Abolitionist Social Work and the USA-Palestine Mental Health Network. Drawing from an April 2025 delegation to Palestine organized by Eyewitness Palestine and the USA-Palestine Mental Health Network, this resource reflects on how care is practiced under military occupation and how resistance is sustained through community, culture, and steadfastness (sumud). It highlights the importance of collective approaches to healing, the impossibility of apolitical care under oppression, and the need to understand distress as a response to systemic harm rather than individual pathology.

Also in July, we updated our Community Care, Not Coercion resource page in response to a new executive order advancing a federal agenda to expand involuntary commitment and deepen the entanglement of mental health systems with policing and surveillance. Framed through the language of “care” and “public safety,” the order works to justify the confinement of unhoused, mad, and disabled people. IDHA’s analysis situates this moment within a longer history of institutionalization and carceral approaches to mental health, while offering tools for resistance rooted in community-based, non-coercive care. The analysis is accompanied by a supplemental resource list and shareable educational post on Instagram, and includes practical guidance for those seeking to challenge coercive policies and build liberatory alternatives.

Blog

The IDHA community holds a wealth of knowledge across a wide range of topics, including mental health, transformative justice, disability justice, creative practice, and more. As part of our commitment to elevating the voices of those most impacted by the mental health system, Through our blog, we seek to surface diverse perspectives, deepen collective inquiry, and reflect the multiplicity of experiences and approaches that shape IDHA’s community.

In 2025, we published two blog posts authored by IDHA members. In Substance Use and Autonomy in Word and Deed, Rosalie Genova examines the contradictions that shape substance use services – from the language used to describe substance use to systems that often undermine autonomy – critiquing dominant narratives rooted in pity, respectability, and essentialism, and calling for a person-centered approach grounded in voluntary care, self-determination, and harm reduction.

In Resounding Remnants: Art and the Echo of Lived Experience, interdisciplinary artist Chanika Svetvilas expands access to her solo exhibition by inviting readers into her creative process and lineage. Through drawings, sculpture, and participatory installations, she transforms lived experience, clinical encounters, and cultural memory into new visual vocabularies, drawing on disability justice, mad pride, and Thai heritage to reimagine care, interdependence, and the sensory landscape of being human.

IDHA’s cross-movement organizing seeks to bridge the transformative mental health movement with broader struggles for liberation. This year, we continued the Decarcerating Care series – marking its five-year anniversary – creating spaces for dialogue, strategy, and reflection across movements. Through this program and beyond, we elevated lived experience and supported collective visioning toward non-carceral approaches to care.

Decarcerating Care

850+

event registrations in 2025

15,600+

all-time views on youtube

IDHA organized our first Decarcerating Care conversation in 2020, in the midst of racial uprisings in the United States and growing calls to rethink crisis response. From the outset, the series has sought to challenge the assumption that the mental health system is inherently benevolent, drawing attention to how it upholds racial hierarchies and operates through logics of surveillance, coercion, and control. Since then, the series has grown into a sustained platform for dialogue and strategy-building, with ten panels reaching more than 15,000 people.

In May, we hosted the ninth installment, Strategy, Struggle & Sustained Commitment. This conversation invited participants to take stock of past, present, and future efforts to decarcerate care in a rapidly shifting political landscape marked by expanding involuntary commitment and deepening entanglements between mental health systems and policing. Panelists Olka Baldeh, Dr. Autumn Asher BlackDeer, Sean Donovan, M. E. O’Brien, and Luke Sikinyi reflected on lessons from movement history, the tensions between immediacy and long-term strategy, and the need to remain grounded in collective care practices amid ongoing harm. Feedback highlighted the depth and honesty of the conversation, with participants naming the importance of “learning from past lessons for current survival” and appreciating the “realness, authenticity, and diversity of voices” that created space for both grief and possibility.

In November, we marked the five-year anniversary of the series with its tenth installment, Lessons in Transforming Crisis Response. Returning to the question that launched the series – how to support people in crisis without relying on policing or coercion – this conversation revisited the trajectory of crisis response efforts since 2020. Panelists Roxanne Anderson, Liz Kennedy, Mimi Kim, Stanley Martin, Nze Okoronta and moderator Jess Stohlmann-Rainey explored what has shifted, what has remained entrenched, and how non-carceral approaches are being practiced on the ground. Participants emphasized the importance of hearing diverse perspectives and concrete examples of work in action, describing the event as both inspiring and grounding, and appreciating how it engaged the “nuances of community crisis care” while affirming that “there are alternate ways to keep our communities safe.”

Across both panels, feedback pointed to a continued need for spaces that not only offer critical analysis, but also support praxis, connection, and movement-building. Participants expressed a desire for more opportunities to engage deeply with strategies, learn from on-the-ground efforts, and build community across roles and geographies. We closed the year by inviting attendees and members into a broader process of reflection and visioning about the future of the series – gathering input on what questions remain, what formats feel most useful, and how Decarcerating Care can continue to evolve in response to a rapidly changing landscape.

Movement Calendar

In 2025, IDHA continued to strengthen and connect the transformative mental health movement through our Movement Calendar, a dedicated space on our website where we cross-list events from peers, partners, and the broader ecosystem. This calendar serves as a tool to amplify the depth and diversity of ongoing work, helping to surface offerings, build connections, and increase access to spaces aligned with mental health liberation.

Throughout the year, we uplifted offerings from a range of organizations, including the Wildflower Alliance, ISPS-US, Mad in America, Black Emotional and Mental Health Collective (BEAM), the Yarrow Collective, among others. We also highlighted offerings from IDHA faculty and members, further strengthening connections across our community and wider movement.

2025 marked a significant year of organizational transformation and transition for IDHA. We undertook a revision of our organizational structure to better support internal clarity and alignment. This process unfolded alongside an announcement of leadership transition, marking the start of an ongoing period of change. Throughout the year, we focused on strengthening internal systems and building a foundation to support IDHA’s continued sustainability.

Structure Revision

In 2025, IDHA completed a comprehensive revision of our organizational structure, culminating a process that began in 2024 following our annual Board and staff retreat. This process was rooted in reflection on IDHA’s growth over time, as well as feedback gathered from across the organization – including staff, Board, Working Group members, and the broader membership. Through surveys and meetings, we surfaced key areas where greater clarity, alignment, and shared understanding were needed to sustain our work and uphold our values in practice. This effort reflects our ongoing commitment to evolving internal systems in response to lessons learned, community input, and the changing conditions in which we operate.

Our revised structure focuses on clarifying roles, responsibilities, and decision-making authority across IDHA, with particular attention to the formation and function of Working Groups and the distinctions between different forms of member participation. It strengthens pathways for engagement while reinforcing communication and transparency across stakeholder groups. The structure is designed to support distributed leadership and participatory governance, reflecting our belief that structure can support liberatory work when shaped with care.

Staff

IDHA’s work is powered by a small but mighty team. In 2025, our staff included Director Jessie Roth, Program Manager Noah Gokul, and Administrative Coordinator Nia Nelson.

In May, Jessie shared her decision to transition out of her role after more than six years of leadership, with an intention for a slow, thoughtful transition process. Her tenure marked a period of significant growth and transformation for IDHA – from a grassroots, fiscally sponsored project to an independent nonprofit with a formal structure, expanded programming, and national reach. In her transition announcement, Jessie reflected on the collective effort that shaped IDHA’s evolution and the importance of sustaining leadership grounded in shared values, community, and movement lineage. This transition unfolded over the course of the year, creating space for thoughtful planning, knowledge-sharing, and continuity.

As a remote and geographically distributed team, we continued to cultivate intentional practices for connection and alignment. We held bi-weekly solidarity spaces focused on Palestine and other global struggles, grounding our work within a broader cross-movement context. We also created space to process the leadership transition as it unfolded, recognizing it as both an operational and relational shift. Informal touchpoints, including virtual co-working and team lunches, helped sustain connection and care within the rhythms of day-to-day work.

Board

IDHA’s Board of Directors is composed of individuals with diverse lived and professional experience across transformative mental health, grassroots organizing, governance, strategy, and more. The Board plays a central role in stewarding IDHA’s mission and ensuring we operate with integrity and sustainability. In addition to formal governance responsibilities, Board members contribute to organizational development and long-term visioning. Our Board culture emphasizes polyphony and a shared commitment to collective liberation.

In 2025, the Board played a key role in guiding IDHA through a period of leadership transition. Following Jessie’s announcement, a Transition Committee led the search for a new Executive Director and stewarded a thoughtful transition process.

In August, the Board and staff gathered in the Hudson Valley for our third in-person retreat. As IDHA marked our nine-year anniversary and prepared for leadership transition, the retreat created space to reflect on our evolution and align around future direction. The agenda balanced strategic discussions with creative practices, centering topics such as programmatic vision, fundraising strategy, communications and positioning, and the onboarding process for a new Executive Director. Key themes emerged around the role of trust in navigating change and the need to balance adaptability with a strong organizational identity.

Throughout the year, the Board convened through quarterly meetings and committee spaces, including Finance & Fundraising and Anti-Oppression. Conversations included assessing political risk and organizational resilience, refining program strategy and audience development, and supporting the Executive Director transition process. These spaces allowed the Board to engage both big-picture strategy and the operational realities of sustaining IDHA’s work.

This year also marked a transition within the Board itself, as longtime Board Chair Denise Ranaghan stepped off the Board after years of dedicated leadership. Denise’s steady presence and commitment to values-aligned governance have been foundational to IDHA’s growth. As she stepped down, co-founder Jazmine Russell transitioned into the role of Chair, bringing historical grounding, and a deep connection to our mission into this next chapter of leadership.

Internships

IDHA interns have the opportunity to engage deeply with transformative mental health, bridging academic learning with lived experience, community knowledge, and organizational work. Interns are embedded within our small, collaborative team and contribute across a range of programmatic and operational areas, gaining exposure to the inner workings of a nonprofit while building relationships within a broader ecosystem of practitioners and activists.

In early 2025, we continued working with our 2024-2025 social work intern, Sarah Klieger. In the second half of their placement, Sarah supported fundraising prospecting, conference research, event planning, and analysis of the broader political landscape impacting nonprofits. They also contributed to adapting the Mad Studies Symposium into a self-paced course, while helping to strengthen IDHA’s data collection practices to better align with our values.

In the summer, we hosted Lesley Tan, an undergraduate intern from NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study. Lesley provided support across the Tending the Future of Care series, membership engagement, and planning for IDHA’s end-of-year fundraiser.

In the fall, we welcomed a new cohort of 2025-2026 social work interns from the Columbia and Silberman Schools of Social Work: Jacks Lockwood and Julia Nachemson. In their first semester, Jacks focused on fundraising prospecting, identifying funding opportunities and assessing alignment with IDHA’s values and priorities. Julia supported planning for the tenth installment of Decarcerating Care, drafted a policy analysis on involuntary commitment trends and liberatory alternatives, and contributed to research and evaluation efforts for the Core Curriculum. Both interns supported the Core Curriculum content refresh by reviewing draft videos and developing accompanying resource lists and discussion questions.

IDHA’s strategy articulates our long-term priorities and areas of growth, emphasizing that our vision and project goals are inseparable from who we are and how we come together as a community. In 2025, we engaged in ongoing conversations to refine our direction, respond to shifting conditions, and strengthen alignment across our programs, structure, and audience. We also placed a substantial focus on anti-oppression, integrating lessons from last year and drawing on support from external partners to strengthen our culture and practices.

Strategic Visioning

IDHA’s work is guided by a multi-year strategic vision, and 2025 marked the second year of our current planning phase (2024-2026). This year’s conversations focused on how to sustain and evolve our work within a rapidly shifting political and funding landscape. Across Board and staff discussions, we considered the broader conditions shaping our work, including rising fascism, increased scrutiny of nonprofits with liberatory missions, and a contracting funding landscape. These conversations affirmed the importance of continuing to operate with clarity and integrity in our values while positioning IDHA for long-term sustainability.

We continued to engage with questions of program strategy and audience. Drawing on data and reflection from the Core Curriculum in particular, we identified themes of strong engagement alongside signs of saturation within our existing networks. This prompted a set of strategic inquiries: how to expand our reach among clinical and other audiences who would benefit from our work; how to more clearly articulate the relevance of transformative mental health in the current moment; and how to adapt to changing patterns of virtual engagement. These reflections informed ongoing experimentation with outreach strategies and content formats.

To further inform our strategic direction, we conducted a series of stakeholder surveys in partnership with AORTA, gathering input from current members, past Working Group members, faculty, and program participants. Insights from these surveys reinforced the demand for values-aligned, skill-based learning that bridges lived experience and practice, and highlighted opportunities to deepen how this work is delivered and who it reaches. This includes expanding pathways for engagement beyond traditional professional audiences, strengthening the integration of lived experience and diverse perspectives within programming, and continuing to evolve offerings that support both critical analysis and practical application. Together, these insights are informing how we refine our programmatic focus, expand our reach, and ensure our work remains responsive to the needs of the communities we serve.

Anti Oppression

Central to IDHA’s organizational development is the ongoing work of becoming an anti-oppressive organization. In 2019, we made a public commitment to this work, spanning anti-racism, disability justice, transformative justice, conflict resolution, and economic accessibility. We continue to approach this commitment as an evolving process – one that requires continuous learning, unlearning, and adaptation across all areas of our work.

In 2025, we maintained a cross-cutting focus on anti-oppression across all programs, ensuring that questions of power, systemic harm, and collective liberation were consistently integrated into curriculum design, facilitation, and participant engagement. This was particularly reflected in offerings such as Tending the Future of Care and Decarcerating Care. Faculty and facilitators were selected with attention to representation and lived experience, resulting in a majority of speakers identifying as people of color, and bringing a wide range of perspectives into dialogue.

We hosted an internal anti-racism training for IDHA members, designed to build shared language and deepen collective analysis around how racism operates across individual, institutional, and structural levels, including within the mental health system. The training reinforced the importance of grounding our work in a shared understanding of power and oppression. Participant feedback highlighted the value of interactive discussion, collective sense-making, and the opportunity to connect lived experience with broader systemic analysis, while also expressing a desire for continued and deeper engagement on these topics.

We also deepened this work through collaboration with external partners. As mentioned above, in partnership with AORTA, we designed and administered a series of stakeholder surveys aimed at assessing how our programming, structure, and participation pathways align with our anti-oppression commitments. Findings from this process informed ongoing changes to Working Group design, member engagement, and program development, strengthening our ability to more intentionally center those most impacted by the issues we engage.

In addition, we worked with Shamillah Wilson to conduct an independent culture review, which explored how IDHA’s values – particularly around anti-oppression, shared power, and inclusion – are experienced in practice. This process surfaced both areas of alignment and areas for growth, including the need for greater clarity around roles, decision-making, and how power operates within our structure. These insights contributed to ongoing internal conversations and adjustments related to organizational design, leadership, and culture.

We received ongoing support from Spring Up, who supported us in strengthening our capacity to navigate conflict and operationalize our values in practice. Through design coaching, we refined several internal resources, including a guide to conflict and harm response in Working Groups, staff guidance on care requests and organizational boundaries, and updated protocols for facilitating dialogue and moderating engagement in virtual program spaces. This work also supported us in mapping where responsibilities live across these workstreams internally and capturing learnings from past organizational experiences to inform more responsive systems.

Throughout the year, IDHA’s Anti-Oppression Committee of the Board met regularly with staff to provide guidance and support for this work. These conversations focused on reflecting on progress, identifying challenges, and ensuring that anti-oppression remained a core lens across programmatic, structural, and strategic decision-making.

We also published an update to our Centered Organizational Accountability page in June, sharing a consolidated overview of the steps we have taken to integrate learnings from past conflicts. This update reflects both concrete changes and ongoing areas of inquiry, and was shared publicly as part of our commitment to transparency and accountability. We recognize that this work is ongoing and deeply interconnected with broader organizational efforts, including strategic planning and structure development.

IDHA’s external relations work is central to how we share and sustain our work. In 2025, we strengthened our communications and funding strategies, with a focus on expanding our reach to new audiences while remaining grounded in a community-driven approach. Through digital engagement and live programming, we worked to increase access to transformative mental health resources and deepen connections across our broader ecosystem.

Communications

In 2025, IDHA continued to strengthen our communications strategy as a key component of external engagement. Our Instagram following grew to 13.4k, where we engage audiences through short-form educational content and program announcements. We maintained an active presence on Facebook and continued to expand our presence on LinkedIn, with a focus on reaching new professional audiences.

We built on prior experimentation with creative communication approaches, continuing to share digestible video clips from live classes and events alongside educational content that connects transformative mental health to current events. Several Instagram posts saw particularly strong engagement, including Centering Culture and Care in Occupied Palestine, our explainer on the new executive order and how to respond, and an introduction to mad liberation. Across platforms, these strategies are designed both to invite people into deeper, ongoing engagement with IDHA’s work and to serve as educational resources in their own right.

We also strengthened our newsletter strategy by introducing a welcome series for new subscribers. This included an initial email offering key entry points into IDHA’s work, followed by a second message a few days later providing direct access to our free “start here” self-paced course, Re-Thinking Mental Health. This approach created more intentional pathways for onboarding and engagement, helping to connect new audiences to our broader ecosystem.

In addition to digital outreach, we expanded our external engagement through both in-person and virtual conference participation. In 2025, IDHA staff presented at gatherings including Anesis’ Multicultural Mental Health Conference, the European Conference for Mental Health, ResilienceCon, and NARPA. These engagements supported broader dissemination of our work, strengthened relationships across aligned fields, and introduced IDHA to new audiences.

Together, these efforts reflect an ongoing focus on expanding our reach to new audiences, experimenting with different approaches, and learning how to more effectively connect people to IDHA’s work over time.

In 2025, IDHA continued to strengthen our commitment to becoming a community-sustained organization, with approximately 40% of our revenue coming from grassroots or non-institutional sources. This includes income generated through our trainings, events, membership dues, and individual donations. This remains closely aligned with our long-term vision of building a more sustainable and community-rooted financial model.

A significant portion of this revenue was generated through our programs, particularly the Transformative Mental Health Core Curriculum, which continues to serve as a key source of earned income. Revenue generated through our offerings plays a critical role in reducing reliance on external funding in an increasingly uncertain funding landscape, while also supporting the full range of costs required to design, facilitate, and sustain our programming.

In December, we hosted Kindling Community, our end-of-year celebration and fundraiser, which raised more than $8,000 in ticket sales and donations. The event brought together members of our community for an evening of reflection, learning, and connection, featuring a powerful keynote from Dean Spade, a panel on collective care in times of uncertainty, an interactive workshop on Transformative Mutual Aid Practices (T-MAPs), and a member artist showcase highlighting the role of creativity in our movements. The gathering created space not only to raise funds, but to reconnect with the values and relationships that sustain IDHA’s work.

We also continued to grow the Equalizing Access Giving Circle, which raised more than $6,000 in 2025. The Giving Circle plays a vital role in expanding access to IDHA’s programming by funding scholarships, subsidizing memberships, and supporting honoraria for experts-by-experience. New members joined throughout the year, reflecting continued investment from our community in making this work accessible to those most impacted.

As part of our engagement with Giving Circle members and other IDHA supporters, we hosted a virtual gathering featuring abolitionist, organizer, and former faculty member Jason Sole. This conversation created space for reflection on organizing and building movements in times of crisis. It offered an opportunity to connect more deeply with those who sustain our work, while also inviting members and supporters into a shared space of dialogue and learning.

Staff

Noah Gokul
Nia Nelson
Jessie Roth

Board of Directors

Veronica Agard
Evan Auguste
Jacqui Johnson
Sarah Napoli
Denise Ranaghan
Jazmine Russell
Jason Stevens

interns

Sarah Klieger
Jacks Lockwood
Julia Nachemson
Lesley Tan

2025 Speakers, Panelists, and Facilitators

Roxanne Anderson
Olka Baldeh
Dr. Autumn BlackDeer
Daniela Ravelli Cabrini
Sean Donovan
Sascha Altman DuBrul
Alberto Vásquez Encalada
Al Galves
Dmitriy Gutkovich
Leah Harris
Benon Kabale
Liz Kennedy
Mimi Kim
Stanley Martin
Mara Martinez-Hewitt
Renya NeoNorton
M. E. O'Brien
Nze Okoronta
Dainius Puras
Sumitra Rajkumar
Yolo Akili Robinson
Eliana Rubin
Robin Sempervirens
Luke Sikinyi
Dean Spade

2025 live series Faculty

Charmaine Harris
Rae Johnson
Vivianne Guevara
Rupi Legha
Nkem Ndefo
Russell Razzaque
Zena Sharman
Hel Spandler
Kai Cheng Thom
Robert Whitake