Franciscan Sisters of Perpetual Adoration Help People Incorporated Look to the Future

When People Incorporated was founded 50 years ago, mental health care looked decidedly different than it does today. Fifty years ago, the field found itself at a turning point away from institutionalization, and towards person-centered care, that sought to assist individuals with significant mental illness to achieve to their personal capacity. Amazingly, this was a ground-breaking thought at the time.

Today, whole-person integrated care is how we work to support those living with mental illness. People Incorporated and others like us, have spent the last fifty years building supports into the community to help individuals live independently. We have filled the gaps that exist in all systems and created services that recognize that mental illness is a fluid disease, and requires dynamic solutions to manage day-to-day. Fifty-one years and counting, we are still learning and honoring the individual experiencing mental illness as the principal voice in the care they receive. These are key to our core values.

Looking to the future, our core values require us to ask essential questions with every client:

Not everyone who needs mental health support knows where to turn for help. Moreover, people from diverse backgrounds and other cultures are less likely to receive needed mental health care due to the stigma associated with mental health, a lack of providers from diverse backgrounds who understand their experiences, and distrust of a health care system that may have fallen short of meeting their needs in past experiences. We’re focusing on mending many of these barriers with improved access, better training, and enhanced opportunities for mental health practitioners from diverse backgrounds.

 

A core area of People Incorporated’s care model is our commitment to Service to Community – a mental health care model that creates partnerships throughout the community to connect individuals in need with vital resources.

 

This is great, right? But our vision for community integration is so much bigger and we’re going to need help to make it possible.

In 2020, the Franciscan Sisters of Perpetual Adoration joined us in this effort by providing a transformational gift that will allow People Incorporated to expand this important work. This gift will support the growth of our Service to Community programming, so essential to community health and wellness, while also supporting training efforts in the areas of cultural understanding and awareness, and the development of career pathways in the mental health field for individuals of diverse backgrounds desiring such.

The Franciscan Sisters of Perpetual Adoration are committed to building bridges of relationships that stretch us to be people of encounter who stand with all suffering in our Earth Community. Our collaboration with People Incorporated provides an opportunity for us to fulfill that mission, to help provide person-centered health care to those in need and bridge the gaps of social inequity they experience.

“Our communities need innovative and sustainable solutions. The need for these solutions has never been greater, and our opportunities to collaborate and forge those solutions have never been more present. At People Incorporated, we are committed to the development of new solutions that not only serve the community but engage the community. Thoughtful gifts and grants allow us to create these new pathways, solve problems and create sustainability. Getting started is always the most difficult space, but easily the most exciting as well,” says Jill West, CEO of People Incorporated.

For more information on People Incorporated’s values and how we live out our work, visit our About Us page.