COMMUNITY WELLBEING NEEDS ASSESSMENT
Community Collaboration: We are hoping to expand not only what we can do for the community, but to build up resources for us all to support each other. Please help provide feedback to keep this moving!
Building educational partnerships to provide empirically-based, multi-professional, recovery-oriented resources that eliminate systemic prejudice and promote community multicultural collaboration.
That sounds like a lot of pretentious terminology. What does it actually mean? Good question.
The aim of the institution is to:
- Build multicultural community
- NYC is one of the most diverse cities on Earth, and yet we remain very segregated. Decades-long research into collaboration shows us how we can overcome this.
- Shift cognitive-emotional-behavioral wellbeing from a health domain into an educational domain
- This addresses the fact that a major portion of challenges stem from environmental factors (nutrition, overworked families, limited community resources, community trauma), also known as “social determinants of health”
- It replaces stigma with connection and empathy: when one person is suffering, it is not their family’s failing or their personal disorder, but our collective challenge as a community
- It shifts the power of change out of exclusively a few highly trained people, and into the full community. All professionals who have something to offer, regardless of specific profession, are welcome to collaborate
- Psychologically, this is consistent with Learning Theory (a highly researched field that bridges education and psychotherapy)
- This shift also has the potential to vastly improve access to help, and address skyrocketing healthcare costs
- Be a resource for people in need to connect them to others in the community who can help
Why “REACHES”?
REACHES stands for: Recovery through Empowerment, Advocacy, Community, Hope, and Engaging Science
How do I fit in?
You are part of our community! We all contribute through our knowledge and compassionate actions to making our communities thrive. The REACHES Initiative is looking for people with specialized knowledge to help build an organization that can improve the emotional wellbeing and vibrancy of our amazing, multicultural NYC tapestry. Examples include, but are not limited to: community organizer; sociologist; lawyer; peer specialist; social worker; journalist.
