Sean Kershaw's Weblog
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January 23, 2007
The value of organizing: success in mental health reform
For the past three years we've helped to convene the Minnesota Mental Health Action Group (MMHAG). Our role really was as simple as convening the stakeholders -- and providing critical leadership in the form of Co-Chair Gary Cunningham -- but the members really did all of the work.
Two recent successes from this are the Governor's budget, and proposals from key legislative leadership.
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Leadership in the legislature introduced a number of reforms at the Capitol last week (I'm looking for the links). And...
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The Governor's budget included $45M in new funding to implement some of the recommendations in this group's Roadmap for Reform (200+ pages Word doc).
MMHAG is the best example in my time here of the critical (and simple) function of bringing together the stakeholders on a policy issue around a core set of principles. This gets to the third bullet point in our mission: organizing the relationships necessary to accomplish our policy goals.
For all of the policy documents and recommendations that had been previously developed, the parties actually impacted by this issue had never sat down together to figure out how to implement these policy goals. MMHAG did that -- and the potential for reform is now greater than it has been in decades.
Posted by Sean Kershaw at January 23, 2007 6:31 AM