Action Group: More Doing!

The Action Group meeting in March was very well attended at each office with lots of new participants! It always makes me smile to know that we are growing as a team with each meeting that occurs! At the last meeting, we finalized our Action Group Charge that will enable us to better help others to understand why we meet as a group and what we are charging ourselves to do at our meetings. This new finalized charge document is something that we feel we can hand out to people who might have found interest in the past of attending a group, but were hesitant not knowing what the group meets to do or what the group might be about. We hope that this document will bring more interest to our group as well as get our charge out there to people letting them know that we are here and we are ready to take action on a lot of our community events that are going on.

The short version of our Action Group Charge is this:

Action Groups are a place for people to be involved. Together, staff and consumers have the opportunity to share, make suggestions and offer input, learn about opportunities to volunteer and get involved, help plan events, and address stigma issues.

 Lisa Woodcox joined our group in March to do a presentation about volunteer opportunities throughout our service areas that other people can call to get involved in. She is part of the Disability Network of Northern Michigan and had various volunteer positions available to speak about in order to get others vamped about what they can become a part of. She explained also how the Disability Network has different programs available including education on fire extinguisher usage, food drives, tours of the fire stations, game nights, and Special Olympics among many more.

Since then, Lisa has come back to Northern Lakes to talk about how we might collaborate on arranging for opportunities for health and wellness for the people we serve, and also about providing regular educational programming at Northern Lakes in the future. The first such endeavor will be a program on Conflict Resolution in early May in our Traverse City office. (Watch for details later.)

We are looking forward to our April meeting when we will discuss finalizing a recovery action tool for people to use to keep on track of their accomplishments, both large and small. We will also discuss what we would like to see in a new newsletter, as Northern Lakes CMH works to combine the New Directions and Expect Recovery newsletters into one newsletter in the future.

Our next meeting is next week, Wednesday, April 11 from 10-12 in the Houghton Lake, Cadillac, and Traverse City offices via video connection. We hope to see you there!