A NEW PRIORITY AREA: Mental health (2025)
Status and 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 share 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 has 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 are hearing about local challenges with access to mental health and wellness care, negative effects of stigma, need for support systems, community education and awareness. Stay tuned for research updates as we learn more and identify promising strategies to pursue.
If this topic interests you, join our team and help make a difference!
Contact Angela Pape, angelapape.mip@gmail.com.
