What started as one man's way of overcoming the years he lost while living with schizophrenia is growing from a citywide and statewide effort into a nationwide drive to register, educate and get consumers of mental health services out to vote.
Ken Steele turned his own recovery into a mission for mental health voter access. His personal story has moved everyone who has heard it. It has also led to tens of thousands of new registered voters. Most registered for the first time in their lives.
"Living with mental illness" is yet another category of people in our society whose label is the subject of stigma and prejudice. While statistics indicate that one out of every five families in America are impacted by mental illness, people living with mental illness are still stigmatized, denied power, and separated all the same with false, misleading images created about them by other people.
Our history is pocked with similar societal blemishes. The first challenge others have had to overcome to change their circumstance was changing the way they see themselves. They needed to define themselves in a positive way as individuals, and as a group of people, before they could change the false, misleading images given to them by others.
The twentieth century has been 100 years of civil rights movements. From women to African-Americans to the young, each group's arrival has been started with a major focus on accessing the vote.
The National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) of 1993, and other corresponding state laws, was brought about as a recognition of the fact that there are many disenfranchised groups lacking opportunities to register to vote, and the NVRA sets a public policy course to right this wrong. They saw the mentally ill as a natural constituency of potentially unregistered American voters.
They were right. Between 1994 and 1998, Steele registered nearly 28,000 voters in New York City. From a one-person vision to an army of 70 volunteers covering Manhattan and Brooklyn, his dream has grown. Steele realized it was time to take this project to the next level. In early 1997, his path crossed with that of Joseph A. Glazer, the newly elected President/CEO of the Mental Health Association in New York State, Inc. (MHANYS). They met at the annual conference of the National Mental Association (NMHA) in Washington, D.C. Glazer is an attorney who has spent 16 years working in and around government and advocacy at the local, state and national level. He was a major political party candidate for the New York State Legislature in 1992. He has very strong insight and skills for advocacy and organizing in the governmental/political arena.
Together, Steele and Glazer have developed the materials and strategy to make the Mental Health Voter Empowerment Project (MHVEP) a statewide and nationwide tool of change for people living with mental illness.
Much of the plan's focus is on voter empowerment through utilizing and enhancing existing networks of consumers and advocates across the mental health spectrum. The MHA network is one example and the starting point.
MHANYS, a federation of 35 local affiliate MHAs serving 41 of New York's 62 counties, is partnering with the MHVEP to bring this effort to fruition. MHANYS is an affiliate of the NMHA, and plans to utilize the MHA structure across the country, as well as our strong network through the entire mental health consumer and advocacy community, to empower consumers to practice their voting franchise. Steele is a very active member of MHANYS' Board of Directors.
At the June 1998 NMHA Annual Clifford Beers conference, named for the man who started the movement to bring humanity to the treatment of people living with mental illnesses, Steele and Glazer presented a half-day institute on MHVEP. With the overall conference theme being MHA and the consumer movement working together, it became the jumping off point for taking MHVEP nationwide.
In August, 1998, Joe Glazer presented a day-long training for consumer groups, MHA and NAMI affiliates from across Texas in Houston. The training focused on teaching organizations how to build strong community bases to do voter empowerment.
Nearly 50 people attended the training, representing at least 5 different communities. Organized by the MHA of Greater Houston, under the direction of Executive Director Betsy Schwartz, and organized by Lynn Lasky-Zgourides, Director of Program and Public Policy for the MHA, the training covered national, state and local issues and the planning and implementing of voter empowerment.
The core of the training is a unique manual, entitled "Vote-It begins with Me." The manual gives an overview of the need and purpose of voter empowerment, and has a step-by-step process for doing voter empowerment in your own community. It has been developed so that it can be specialized for each location that participates, inserting sections that address their own laws, rules and requirements.
Among the participants in the training was David Clark, a consumer who is President of Houston Area Mental Health Advocates. The luncheon speaker was State Representative Garnet Coleman, who disclosed his own experiences with depression in the early 1990s, and has since become one of the strongest advocates for community mental health services in Texas. Closing remarks were given by Dr. Steven Schnee, who is Executive Director of the Mental Health/ Mental Retardation Authority of Harris County, which serves the nearly 3 million people living in Houston and the surrounding suburbs.
MHVEP and MHANYS are presently pursuing funding from several sources, and hope to take voter empowerment to every state in the nation.