Community Access's Advocacy and Public Policy Department was launched in 1996. Its mission is threefold:

• To inform the community, comprised of mental health recipients, policy makers, government officials, media, funders and the general public about the rights and needs of people with psychiatric disabilities.
• To involve consumers in shaping city, state, national and international mental health policy, thereby improving conditions, services and opportunities.
• To develop peer-run program models as alternatives to current ways of providing mental health services.

The Advocacy Department is dedicated to enhancing the capacity of mental health consumers to effectively represent and advocate for their own needs. The Department uniquely trains and empowers mental health consumers to engage in activities to help shape the city, state, and national mental health policies that can lead to systems change.

We are focused on the broad issues of increased accessibility of employment and housing for mental health consumers. We also work closely with the New York Association of Psychiatric and Rehabilitation Services (“NYAPRS”) on issues such as:

• The deplorable conditions in adult homes
• Increasing shifts in mental health service delivery, such as the pending implementation of the State-sponsored Personalized Recovery Oriented Services
• Potential limits on access to necessary medications covered by Medicaid
• The inhumane solitary confinement of prisoners who have a mental illness

The Department has both an internal and external focus. Within the agency itself, the Department provides training and outreach to residents of the Agency’s housing programs and participants of our employment, education, and socialization programs. Externally, the Department advocates locally and nationally to educate community-wide mental health systems and programs on becoming more responsive to consumer needs.

In addition to the ongoing advocacy work of educational meetings with State legislators, serving as leaders in the Campaign for a new New York/New York Agreement to provide additional supportive housing beds, and serving as leaders in the broadly based New York Campaign for Mental Health Housing Reform—to name only a few—we have plans ready to be implemented that would greatly expand our reach to more psychiatrically disabled New Yorkers. Some of these initiatives include:

• Plans this fiscal year to host a legal symposium to help educate the local legal community—and open a dialogue with them—about some of the critical issues outlined above that are in need of review and improvement.
• We also believe that the larger community would be better served were we to regularly craft and distribute public policy and legal publications.

These are all new areas that we believe will have a direct and positive impact on the community of mental health consumers in New York.