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City Voices incorporated at the beginning of the year and is now an official small business. This means that what was once merely a project of a larger entity is now an independent business all its own. What’s more, it is run by the seriously and persistently mentally ill.
Our annual budget remains small in the $50-$60,000 range, yet we have accomplished quarterly newspapers like the one in your hands, events like mental health comedy shows and house parties, a wonderfully redesigned website with roughly 600 unique visitors per month, and ongoing peer mentoring and peer advocacy programs to help our peers who have less experience in an often unpleasant, competitive society.
Our ambitions are:
**to achieve full non-profit, tax-exempt status with the Internal Revenue Service within one year;
**to have a vibrant office filled with peer-volunteers to help sustain the projects;
**to organize more wonderful events for our peers;
**to build a sense of community within a big city for our peers;
**to help grassroots mental health advocacy groups by involving peers in meaningful ways with the politics that affect us;
**to maintain an active board of directors; and
**to successfully raise funds to support the projects.
Many volunteers have come and gone since we incorporated, many of whom were people without a mental illness diagnosis who wanted to help because they are good people. There is a very large pool of talented people across the globe who will volunteer their time and talent for a good cause. It was just a matter of posting City Voices’ ads on the Internet in sites like idealist.org, cucs.org and of course nycvoices.org.
The work cannot be done by one person alone, but one person might have the vision of what the work might bring to the future of the mental health community. Bringing the vision to life will involve many people who may have ideas of their own. Along the way, all of us will face challenges, temptations and difficult decisions. We should expect to fail a lot, to hopefully succeed where it counts, and to ultimately make a lasting and positive impact on our small community, which, in turn, may affect our larger society. Only time will tell.