Citizens Community Collaborative
Citizenship
A DMHAS-supported project
What is Citizenship?
In our work with people receiving services for mental health and substance use challenges, we use the word “citizenship” to mean full participation in and belonging to community and society.
For all of us, participation and belonging are important keys to mental health. For people who experience mental health challenges, clinical care is only part of recovery.
In citizenship, we say that almost all of a person’s journey takes place outside the clinic. The citizenship model adds a focus to what’s beyond the clinic walls.
For information about how to receive training, consultation, and technical assistance in the citizenship model, please scroll down.
Five R’s of Citizenship
In citizenship we explore the whole context of a person’s life, including each person’s rights, roles, resources, responsibilities, and relationships. These “Five R’s” help define our personal roots and values, as well as our interactions with society. People who enter mental health treatment already have the Five R’s, although due to the disruptions many of them experience in their lives, their connections to the Five R’s may be fragile.
Citizenship in Mental Health Care
It’s essential that service providers have the tools, knowledge and resources needed to offer citizenship-oriented support to people. This support recognizes and builds on people’s existing connections and strengths in their communities. It takes a collaborative approach to tackling challenges and barriers to recovery at their source, rather than seeing them as an individual’s problems.
Training, Consultation, and Technical Assistance
We have over 25 years of experience designing, producing, and researching citizenship-oriented practices in the mental health field. Some of our programs include:
- Large-scale training of mental health professionals, such as Connecticut’s statewide Recovering Citizenship Learning Collaborative (2020-2023)
- ‘The Citizens Project,’ a program for people with histories of mental illness and incarceration
- Community asset mapping
- Community-based advocacy groups
- The practice of co-design, based on the work of Dr. Dietra Hawkins
- Developing financial health supports for people that emphasize flexible, person-centered supported financial decision making, and connecting with and advocating for safe and affordable banking services
We offer training, consultation, and technical assistance to help mental health clinics and programs develop their own locally-focused, citizenship-oriented practices. Through the Yale Program for Recovery and Community Health, we work with people and organizations in our home state of Connecticut as well as across the U.S. and the world.
To learn more, please contact:
Annie Harper, PhD
Director, Citizenship Program
Yale Program for Recovery and Community Health