A NEW PRIORITY AREA: Mental health (2025)

Status 

While maintaining a broad interest in general community Mental Health issues, MIP has selected the priority areas of Youth Mental Health and Natural support systems for people of all ages.

To further these goals, in the spring of 2026, for Mental Health Awareness month, MIP participated in the Home, Healthcare & Hospice Services 50 & Better Expo, and in the Monadnock Youth Coalition Mental Health Awareness Fair.
Our display included materials from the many Monadnock region faith communities, prayerful reflections with candles, and meditative singing bowls.

We are now working with the nonprofit We R HOPE to promote mental health wellness for children and youth in partnership with local schools. 

We are also exploring how MIP can make a difference with natural support systems in our region. And we continue to delve deeper into these topics to understand what is available in our area and how MIP can impact our local systems in positive ways. 

Timeline

In the spring of 2025, MIP entered a new phase of listening towards identifying MIP’s next community organizing focus area. Listening is a spiritual practice in which we open our hearts and minds to share authentically and listen deeply to our neighbors. MIP conducted 17 listening sessions at various places throughout the Monadnock region, concluding with a reporting meeting and then a community assembly, where a new focus area was selected.

At listening sessions, community members shared personal stories about their lives and barriers they experience to living a full and healthy life in our region. We seek to listen with our whole hearts, discern together our next project for positive systemic change, and together become a aforce for love in an often broken world.

We used the collective insights from these listening sessions and our reporting session to choose a new community organizing project on which to focus our efforts in the coming months: Mental Health.

MIP then formed a mental health research team to identify where we can be most impactful. The team has met with local professionals knowledgeable about mental health challenges, including the following:

  • Monadnock Family Services
  • MAPS Counseling Services
  • Trauma Responsive Monadnock
  • Monadnock Peer Support
  • Monadnock Youth Coalition
  • Keene High School Youth Group
  • Cheshire Medical Center
  • Keene Senior Center
  • NAMI/NH, (National Alliance on Mental Illness)
  • Individual therapists and social service providers.

We heard about local challenges with access to mental health and wellness care, negative effects of stigma, need for support systems, community education and awareness.

The MIP Mental Health Research honed in on the following priority areas where we think we could have the greatest impact:

  • Youth mental health
  • Natural support systems for people of all ages

Stay tuned for status updates as we learn more and begin pursuing promising strategies.

If this topic interests you, join our team and help make a difference!

Contact Angela Pape, angelapape.mip@gmail.com.