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Consumer Helping Others In a Caring Environment (CHOICE) has as its mission helping, encouraging, and supporting persons who, like ourselves, have used mental health services.
CHOICE offers peer advocacy, homeless outreach, case management and related services in a friendly environment. We bring programs to people who have been underserved and require assistance to obtain vital services. We seek to help people become fully empowered, independent and integrated into the wider community.
CHOICE reaches out to people marginalized by society and assists them in improving the quality of their lives through peer support and linkages.
CHOICE gives individuals the unique opportunity to work with someone who is clearly not of the system but can negotiate for them with the system.
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CHOICE functions as an open door to the mental health system; whereas many services have pre-requisites for service,
CHOICE has few such barriers. All of our services are free to the client, and only a limited number of slots bill Medicaid. Most of our services are funded by a county grant contract.
Clients may receive services without a driver’s license or even a social security card; in fact, collection of basic identity documentation is often a service we perform.
The disdain and prejudice that many people have experienced within the system of mental health services is itself a barrier; the fact that CHOICE personnel have genuine empathy for the clients, whom they always treat with consideration and respect, is another way in which CHOICE removes barriers to service.
CHOICE is very cognizant of cultural differences, and employs a number of Latino and African American staff members.
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Living with mental illness is more about living than mental illness.
The peer movement is predicated on the idea that there is a knowledge base of proven, experiential, indigenous wisdom that has come from struggling with the problems of mental illness in concrete ways.
Services at CHOICE are designed, managed, supervised and provided by people who have experienced mental illness, diagnosis, hospitalization and homelessness, as well as the discrimination and stigma attached to them. We are in a significant sense the peers of the people who come to us for help.
CHOICE looks at the strengths of the individual, not how they’ve been labeled. We believe that the program participants are best equipped to determine their own goals. Our job is to support them without judgment.
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