·         Recovery Focused Care:  In our experience, any participation with clients must derive from authentic collaboration. Our clients see themselves as the directors of their services, for if services are not self tailored to the needs of the individual in community, then these plans are for services that only serve ourselves! Clients wish and need to be in charge of their treatment and lives.

·         Collaborative Practice:  All services are self-tailored to the client in community. We try to bring in all who are part of the client’s system. This could include schools, mandated operations (CPS, Probation), potential employers, social workers, caseworkers, psychiatrists, specific friends or relatives, or anyone that can support the system.  It is important to know their needs and have their collaboration.

·         Connection, Collaboration, and Change: We wish to create an environment where no one feels judged but, rather, is allowed a conversational space where the client leads “the team” to what is important to talk about. Clients need the freedom to express their thoughts in a manner that respects and hears their ideas for change. We talk in the client’s language. We work with all emotional and relational challenges in this manner on the premise that no one wishes to be talked to, but talked with.

·         Connect: Through establishing a connection of full presence with the clients and the community, where communication, relationships, and problem solving skills can be improved.

·         Relational Collaboration: Refers to the completely shared and egalitarian experience of defining the focus and direction of therapy and community services.

·         Being Fully Present to Listen: Full presence refers to a therapist’s posture of genuinely honouring and valuing the client’s and community’s narratives by speaking honestly and caringly, as well as co-creating genuine trust and humility, enabling the strengths of the client to abound.   

·         In community based work we work within the entire system.  There are continuous conversations between all involved. We hope within clinics to have the opportunity for all present in the problem system to be participating at all times. Therefore therapist, psychiatrist, social workers, client, and community support are all team players, empowering the client to gain self agency engages self responsibility in the client-led direction. This enables meaningful change to occur.

Communities in Recovery

This is an alternative recovery model to traditional MFT theoretical philosophies on community and recovery oriented approaches. Our goal is to focus on the needs of mental health care by providing a panel from two countries to present our experiences of providing services to all mental health populations. Discussions will focus on parity to non-parity diagnoses, substance abuse, homelessness, education, wrap around services, work options, and enriched community support and involvement.

In our recovery model of community based work, we work within the entire client system.  It is a “down/top” type of venue where the client is the expert in their treatment and aides in directing the type of needs for community involvement. In all of our work we embrace the idea that severe mental illness and addictions are often symptoms that make a person be seen as deficit. Often, all that is seen are symptoms and not the person, the context, nor the relationships in—or potential relationships within—the community.  We think that most of the “people” we work with have the possibility of recovering their own agency, deciding for themselves the best “solutions of their own situation”, and have the opportunity to empower themselves  to design their possibilities to live in a better way.

We hope to offer mental health workers, social workers, clinicians, and university educators to have the opportunity to witness this model where we include all present in the client’s “problem system” to be active participants at all times in the community engagement. Therapist, psychiatrist, social workers, client, and community support are all team players on the client’s team. These ideas are evidenced based and reflect the works of the Houston Galveston Institute, Kanankil Institute, Institute of Now I See a Person, Miller, Duncan & Hubble (1997), Jaakko Seikula in Finland and the Rhizome Way of Christopher Kinman and Lynn Hoffman.