I try to make no secret that I spent many years in active addiction. That I spent years with untreated mental illness. No secret that I have been to jail more than once. No secret that I have spent time unhoused and that there is trauma in my past. I make no secrets about being a member of the LGBTQIA+ community nor that I am neurodivergent. I make no secrets about these things because I am a lived experience professional. I am a credential peer worker and a credentialed public health worker in my state of residence. I work full time on the Mobile Crisis Outreach Team in my community.
Mobile Crisis Outreach Teams (MCOTs) provide face-to-face help to people who are at risk of harm to themselves or others. An MCOT provides counseling services to people at their home, school or other location. The services are available 24 hours a day, seven days a week. MCOTs provide a combination of crisis services – including emergency care, urgent care, and crisis follow-up and relapse prevention to the child, youth or adult in the community.
https://www.hhs.texas.gov/
I don’t say all this to imply that I am making positive change in my community. But I am certainly doing my best to position myself to do so! We see people in the community mental health clinic where our office is. We see people in the county jail. We see people in the homeless and domestic violence shelters and in the local hospitals. We see people wherever they are when they need the supports and resources we are in a position to provide. I am a part of my team specifically because my lived experience places me in a position to advocate on the behalf of those we serve and not solely for the system that we serve.
I have an opportunity in my life to do something positive with the negative things I have experienced. I have an opportunity to develop my voice as an advocate for the people in my community who do not have access to their voices. This is where we get into the “How would you improve your community?” question and what my answer(s) might be.
1 – Educate, at the community level, on social determinants of health.
Social determinants of health (SDOH) are the conditions in the environments where people are born, live, learn, work, play, worship, and age that affect a wide range of health, functioning, and quality-of-life outcomes and risks.
SDOH can be grouped into 5 domains: Economic Stability, Education Access and Quality, Health Care Access and Quality, Neighborhood and Built Environment, and Social and Community Context
https://health.gov/healthypeople/priority-areas/social-determinants-health
2 – Address the lack of Affordable Housing.
Nationally, there is a shortage of more than 7 million affordable homes for our nation’s 10.8 million plus extremely low-income families.
There is no state or county where a renter working full-time at minimum wage can afford a two-bedroom apartment.
Seventy percent of all extremely low-income families are severely cost-burdened, paying more than half their income on rent.
National Low Income Housing Coalition https://nlihc.org/
3 – Mental Health Awareness
May, which in the United States is Mental Health Awareness Month, is right around the corner. Observed since 1949 Mental Health Awareness Month was started by Mental Health America (https://www.mhanational.org/) and is observed across the country to directly address the stigma surrounding behavioral care of all types.
Ultimately the power to make positive changes in the communities that we call home, to improve our communities, rests in our hands. Welcoming the stranger, picking up litter, getting engaged in a local cause that is important to you, these are all ways to make our lives, and the lives of those around us, better.
❤ U
JamieSputnik 
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