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If you are interested in the welfare of this newspaper and the City Voices media and advocacy project as a whole, please read this article in its entirety.

The City Voices project involves mostly mental health consumers working together to produce a quarterly newspaper, an annual fundraiser, conferences on the arts and other events like the roundtable discussion with Mad in America author Robert Whitaker, the Fourth of July picnic of 2002 and all of the house parties.

We are a small project. Most of the administration is done by a single individual. We rely heavily on volunteers who make little to no money from this. Our budget has tripled over the years, but does not exceed $100,000. We do not have an office outside of our homes. We do not have full participation from the majority of our editorial board and we have always relied on an existing non-profit corporation to serve as our fiscal sponsor. Without a fiscal sponsor, we would probably not have succeeded to this point.

Now we are in a pickle because our current fiscal sponsor of six years has asked us to fly from their nest to become our own non-profit corporation. Although all that incorporating really means is to pay the government some filing fees to recognize us as a non-profit and provide an identification number, there is a lot more to succeeding as a corporation than that.

I do not believe that cash money, technology, office space, or even skilled volunteers have been the main reasons for City Voices' success. I think the essential ingredients have been:

Dedication toward fulfilling a vital, unmet need within the mental health community
The trust we have established with hundreds of mental health consumers
The hope for recovery, reintegration, rehabilitation, dignity and respect that we who are involved with the project fight for every day that we leave the house to face life and the people in it.
There is tremendous, unlocked potential within every mental health consumer to transform themselves and their communities in a way that reflects how people should live with their neighbors.

City Voices as a non-profit corporation would work to affect this kind of change and to start shifting public perception of consumers as a people who laugh, cry and make merry like anyone else. This may make it easier for us to be more open about our experiences in order to ultimately co-exist on planet Earth in mutual understanding. It is possible that peace and harmony may require tremendous conflict, suffering, and effort. Hopefully, all of this can occur through level-headed communication.

We are looking for dedicated people to join us as members of our board of directors. Your function would be to oversee the programs, offer ideas and ways to implement them and to create strategies as a team to keep our ship afloat on its mission of peace as we explore the brave new world of small business focused on social services. These are exciting times for City Voices as we step away from the bleachers to join the players on the field. We may be underdogs in our chaotic world, but we are also beacons of light for those lost in it.

Catherine Huynh, a project director with the National Consumer Supporter Technical Assistance Center said, "People with mental disorders are among America's most disenfranchised groups, and our efforts to build a mental illness constituency amounts to one of the last great civil rights movements."