The mission of the Copeland Center for Wellness and Recovery is to promote personal, organizational, and community wellness and empowerment. We focus on shifting the system of mental health care toward a prevention and recovery focus. As the system shifts to reform through education, training, and research we use the accomplishments developed and implemented by the people being served and the people who care for them. We reinforce this by building networks that reflect mutual support and community organizational empowerment.
The Copeland Center team is a group of individuals who are committed to creating culturally relevant healing spaces, bring innovative projects to life such as a youth peer support curriculum that was developed by and for youth, and live a life connected to the values of peer support. We are a team that is driven to collaborate with people and organizations that support an expanded vision of wellness and inclusion. We are highly motivated, highly flexible, and driven by the mission to support people in the most difficult times of their lives. It is how we have been able to reach over 35,000 people each year with a small team. We use a system of seeing what’s strong rather than what’s wrong to advocate for what we know works with our voices of lived experience of mental health challenges and trauma recovery at the front of that advocacy. We regularly hear from partners and individuals that connecting with our team changes their practices and encourages them to more deeply connect with how wellness is showing up personally and professionally. Additionally, the Copeland Center is always promoting peers into leadership roles to get diverse voices into the national stage as experts by experience. While other similar organizations promote a medical model rooted in white supremacy, the Copeland Center demonstrates the deep knowledge and healing that exists and can be created utilizing evidence-based peer practices.
The Copeland Center is a peer-run non-profit; we are composed of the people in the community we serve including a network of peer facilitators with lived experience of mental health challenges. We have formal and informal ways for community members to be involved and hold leadership. We host networking councils for a variety of affinity groups: peer warmline operators (a crisis line but hosted by people with lived experience), people who are justice involved, people seeking support with psychiatric advance directives(PADs) to protect their rights during crisis, youth leaders, and more. We seek input and partnership with individuals and peer-run organizations to amplify our message and advocacy. We are also a highly sought after partner from government agencies, researchers, and others trying to get messages out to our community as they know we are better able to find speakers, get surveys completed, find participants, and successfully create relevant events.
