Wellness in a Faith Community
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This document summarizes the process undertaken by a faith community to establish a wellness center. It describes establishing leadership support, creating a shared vision through community surveys, setting accountability by assigning project leads, gathering ideas, prioritizing through voting, researching best practices, piloting programs, reducing legal risks, and keeping the design practical. The goal was to create a safe space for those suffering from mental, physical, or spiritual hardship through a spirit of collaboration, innovation, passion and love.
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Wellness in a Faith Community
- 1. Wellness in a Faith Community A Story of Research, Design, Logistics and Love by Van Shea Sedita Download or view this presentation: http://bit.ly/vanwellness
- 2. “Community Service By Design” published in 2015 by Adaptive Path
- 5. 16
- 6. “To live is to suffer. To survive is to find meaning in the suffering.’ - Friedrich Nietzsche
- 7. DO NO HARM 0
- 8. Jack Akester, Former Member of the Board of Directors; MHA Delaware
- 9. Gail Riblett Eden; Survivor
- 10. “We are trying.. and we are accepting.”
- 12. LEADERSHIP Passion, Support and Sacrifice 1
- 14. Leadership Rev. Dr. Nathaniel PhillipsRev. Dr. Patrick Vaughn
- 15. Leadership Rev. Dr. Patrick Vaughn ● Talked openly about mental illness ● Related it back to scripture ● Contributed to, led and organized volunteers and meetings after hours
- 16. Vision Imagine what a perfect future state may be. 2
- 17. Inspiration “At the root of this dilemma is the way we view mental health in this country. Whether an illness affects your heart, your leg or your brain, it’s still an illness, and there should be no distinction.” Michelle Obama
- 18. SHARED FOCUS Leadership and Key People Agree On Vision and A Plan of Action 3
- 20. Survey congregation and stakeholders to describe their Vision for the church, as well as its Strengths, Weakness, Opportunities and Threats—in their own words. Vision and Shared Focus Survey congregation and stakeholders to describe where they saw the church in 5 years, as well as who they thought should represent the church if it were to hire a public figure as a spokesperson. Set time to get key people together to review results and cluster together main ideas which will focus thinking and decision making.
- 21. ACCOUNTABILITY Establish Leads for Diverse Efforts 4
- 22. Organizing 1. Impactful Re-Introduction to Our Neighborhood 2. Developing New Worshiping Communities 3. Establishing a Welcoming Campus 4. Creating a Wellness Ministry Red Clay’s Focus Areas:
- 23. TRANSPARENCY Announce the Intention of the Group 5
- 24. “Are You Well?”
- 25. GATHER IDEAS Funnel Requests and Opinions 6
- 27. PRIORITIZE IDEAS Less is more. 7
- 28. Looking at all our ideas Focusing through voting
- 29. RESEARCH We Are Not Alone 8
- 30. What is the training and criteria for support group leaders? Key Questions Do we need a screening procedure for those attending any support group? How do we ensure safety to participants and volunteers alike?
- 33. REDUCE RISK LOGISTICS, COMMUNICATION AND LEGAL 10
- 34. Standard Beginning of Email: 1. Reminder of what we’re doing: 2. Who is Red Clay? 3. What is the Wellness Center? 4. How this project came to be.. 5. Wellness Center Principles: Monthly Update section: 1. Our Priorities: 2. Upcoming Events: 3. Accomplishments: 4. Action Items: 5. Risks: Monthly Email Updates Format
- 37. Vision Red Clay as a safe and trusted location for everyone. Helping with issues people may be unable to go to government, professionals, friends or family with.
- 38. Mission Our Wellness Center is to be a place of comfort and light for our community. Open to those who suffer from second-hand or personal effects of mental, spiritual or physical hardship of any kind.
- 39. Who We Are We are compassionate. Nurturing well-being, physical health, and dignity of each other and those we serve. We are collaborative. We seek to share our best practices and respect the mutual contributions. We are innovative. We challenging ourselves and our partners to improve the way we work and serve. We are passionate in the pursuit of our mission. We serve all equally, with integrity and openness, breaking down barriers that push people to the fringes due to stigma of illness or crisis.
- 40. Design 1. Clear And Easily Readable Graphics and Symbols 2. High-Contrast Narrow Color Palette Outdoors, Brighter Broader Primary Colors Indoors, More Modern Color Palettes for Digital Materials 3. Large, Plain and Strong Typography 4. Direct, Caring and Gentle Messaging and Tone
- 41. 1. Autism Awareness 2. Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction 3. Walking Journal 4. Grief and Grieving 5. Depression Support 6. Cyber protection 7. Spiritual Wellness 8. Hearing and Hearing Loss CHADD (ADHD Information and Support) 9. Sing, Sing, Sing-out 10. Divorce Support 11. Hospice Care 12. Alzheimers Support 13. Medicare/Medicaid 14. Addictions 15. Health Screening 16. Widow / Widower Groups 17. Healthy Cooking 18. Heart Disease 19. How to prepare for a funeral, costs & options 20. Time Management & Self Regulation 21. Parenting Programs
- 43. ““Love is at the root of everything. All learning. All parenting. All relationships. Love, or the lack of it.” ~ Fred Rodgers
- 45. Dr. Rev. Nate Phillips, Senior Pastor of Kirk in the Hills, Michigan
- 46. Setup your Rebel Alliance for Love.
- 47. You Faith Community 1. Why is this important to you? 2. Where does the institution stand on their vision as well as mental illness / wellness center? 3. Who is a good partner who could help you with this? 4. What are some facts you can gather that would help people understand the need? 5. What other institution has something similar to research and reference? NAMI 1. What training / information could be offered by NAMI? 2. Does NAMI FaithNet give you ideas or resources? 3. In understanding the need, are there relevant statistics about your community you could reference? Your Next Steps for a Wellness Center Could Be.. Family 1. How do they feel about mental illness and the idea of you helping? 2. What other obligations could suffer? 3. How much personal time could you devote to this?
- 48. 1. Do No Harm 2. Vision 3. Shared Focus 4. Accountability 5. Transparency 6. Gather Ideas 7. Prioritize Ideas 8. Research 9. Experimenting 10. Reduce Risk 11. Practicality 12. Love Summary
- 49. I welcome feedback, questions and ideas! van@vanshea.com Download or view this presentation: http://bit.ly/vanwellness
Editor's Notes
- HI, I’m Van Shea Sedita a Experience Designer and Strategist based in Delaware. I also am a board member of NAMI Delaware. It’s my pleasure to be here. I wish I could say that I lived a deeply religious life—from this title you might think that I do. I think my life is more a life of faith than religion. Faith that any good deeds I do, will affect me and others more positively than any selfish or “bad” deeds I do. That’s all. This presentation is a story surrounding the methods myself and a few others used to help our church establish a wellness center in attempts to help our congregation and larger community. You may, by the end of this presentation, have a guide to follow for your own wellness program, understand our story a little better, or just understand me a little better. I have also provided a shortlink for this presentation should you want to rewatch it in the future.
- This presentation is based on this post I wrote in cooperation Adaptive Path in 2015. If you view this presentation, you can find the link to that piece by clicking this image, or Googling of course.
- I first heard the term “mentally ill” when I was 12. I was playing video games in my bedroom,when out of the corner of my eye I saw a blur in the backyard below. I paused the game, Shinobi on the Sega Genesis I think, and noticed a leg wrap over the top of my backyard wall and a police woman vaulted herself up and over the wall and rush toward my home’s back door. My heart sank and I froze. I cautiously rose from my bed and called for my parents. They responded normally which made me call out “I think the police are here.” I watched my mother reading in the living room as I saw her immediately look up toward the bay window. “Oh my God.” she muttered. I rushed to the front of the house and saw that our house was surrounded by police cars. My mother opened the front door cautiously and police flooded our foyer and came down the hallway through the back kitchen. It was the surrealist experience I had ever had in my life. It turned out, step brother, a paranoid schizophrenic, had called the police claiming he was stabbed in the back at our home. He did this when my father refused to give him money on a phone call earlier that morning. I heard my parents talking this through and my mom intervened in my dad’s story and said “You see officers, his son is mentally ill, we’re very sorry.”
- In addition to my step brother, I have 5 people in my life, close to me, that struggle daily with mental illness, including addiction. I have known 11 people, who’ve lost that struggle and have died from mental illness, either by suicide or overdose.
- Their struggles, occasional crisis and episodes, and of course their funerals all weigh on me tremendously. This has compelled me to help change systems that may demonize, ostracize, or disenfranchise those who suffer.
- I guess you could say I identify as a survivor of mental illness...as someone recovering. And with that I’m looking for some meaning to the confusion, heartache, violence and loss of life.
- In an attempt to find meaning, I’ve been actively listening and helping friends with addiction issues for several years. In trying to help, I don’t want to complicate or hurt their lives. So when approaching a congregation and community in the story you’ll hear today, I wanted to also approach things very slowly and carefully. In the beginning, before I started emailing, organizing and leading meetings, I suspected that people who were also suffering the effects of mental illness might be attending these meetings, reading these emails, volunteering and / or offering to help. I wanted to make everyone comfortable. I definitely didn’t know the best way to do this all, so I didn’t want to impose my ideas on anyone in any judgmental, exclusive or restricting way.
- I wanted to be a good listener, a friend even to those who may try to help us. Jack has been a mental health advocate and a volunteer for a number of years. He started the first Depression Support group organized at Red Clay and has been a source of personal guidance and wisdom for me with this effort.
- Gail’s son Nick is an especially painful topic for me. Nick volunteered, came to the meetings, and helped with events. But unfortunately on November 28th of 2016, three months into trying to help with this effort, Nick committed suicide. Previous to that day, he had a total of 4 unsuccessful suicide attempts..
- (leave on screen for a sec)
- Before I begin to dig into my presentation I wanted to point out a resource for everyone. NAMI has FaithNet which is a resource for faith communities who want to support persons and families living with mental illness. I will just leave this up for about 30 seconds for you all to review and digest.
- The beginning of every successful project I’ve ever been apart of has had strong leadership at its foundation. I grew up with a rigid and stifling sense of religion, and I was never enthusiastic about what religion historically or culturally represented. But when I started attending Red Clay Creek’s services in 2014, I experienced a warmth and approachability by the church leadership that I hadn’t encountered in a long time...or ever maybe.
- I didn’t feel any sense that I had to conform to a doctrine-I felt no pressure to immediately join. I felt that if I was to contribute, I would just be apart of a community of others who were also helping.
- The two leaders in the church, Patrick and Nate, believed greatly in the promise of the wellness center and helping those who suffer from mental illness.
- Patrick took the lead for the efforts of the Wellness Center. He openly talked about his grandfather’s suicide and made sense of his struggles and tried to reduce the shame that other’s felt when confronting their own demons or those of loved ones. Patrick also had a clear understanding of how and why this could be impactful to the community and congregation.
- So with a focus on “doing no harm”, a clear backing from the church leadership, we had to gather some key congregation members together and understand what our Vision was before we could even understand Why mental illness even mattered to us..
- Crafting that vision needs inspiration, and for me, this viewpoint makes a lot of sense. There’s a realism to this holistic view. But how do we understand what inspires the church, and ultimately the vision of the congregation and church leadership?
- We needed to get together and understand what all our ideas and expectations were.
- Church stakeholders organized for a Communication Workshop. We used post it notes, sharpies and a whiteboard and worked with Red Clay’s Vision Team, to understand the needs and vision of Red Clay as it prepared for it’s 300th anniversary in 2022.
- First, we issued a survey asking congregation and stakeholders to describe their vision for the church, as well as its Strengths, Weakness, Opportunities and Threats—in their own words. Secondly, we surveyed the entire body of stakeholders and congregation to find out where they saw the church in 5 years, as well as who they thought should represent the church if it were to hire a public figure as a spokesperson. I compiled all the survey results and used them as discussion points to focus the workshop and conversation. At the end of the workshop, we had an understanding of what we represent to the congregation, as well as what we’d like to be in the future and ultimately how and where we’d like to focus our efforts.
- Next we had to establish leads for key areas of the church’s new direction.
- Several weeks after the Communication Workshop, the same stakeholders and the church’s vision team met and created subcommittees using our focus and as a guide. We then allowed interested parties to volunteer for the groups, and chose leaders who had expressed a personal interest to lead these subcommittees.
- After the group accepted me a volunteer convenor for the wellness center, I was asked to announce my intentions to the group in a statement. Apart of doing no harm, sharing our vision and trying to be a good leader I wanted to be as transparent as possible with my thoughts and needs.
- I wanted the message to be broad yet simple. I didn’t want to talk down to anyone, or to try to prove to anyone that a wellness center was needed. We had already decided that. I wanted to get people thinking about the blessings they currently had in their lives and how they could share those blessings with others who were struggling mentally, spiritually or physically.
- The announcement was received well and passionate members began to volunteer. Church leaders reached out to members who shared personal experience, I connected with them if they seemed interested and we started to meet once a month. We went through all the workshop ideas, emails and discussions we had received and that we each had individually.
- Remember: We had many ideas to review from the church’s workshops, so we needed to narrow our focus.
- Our new volunteers gathered as group and used Post-it notes to discuss and prioritize our focus for a wellness program. We divided our ideas into External and Internal buckets. We voted on all of them and the ones that recieved the most votes were prioritized ahead of the others.
- To understand how exactly we should implement these programs, we sought guidance, experience and samples from programs at other churches who had started similar programs. The feedback and ideas we received pointed out that safety should be the first order of any institution’s program.
- Some early key questions were: If we do want to start support groups, what is the training and criteria for support group leaders? Do we need a screening procedure for those attending any support group? How do we ensure safety to participants and volunteers alike?
- We had the idea that we wanted to try out some programs, so we sought professionals to bring their methods to our congregation and community. We soon pulled together some test programs with the help of NAMI and others to gauge interest.
- Josh visited a few times supplying some sorely needed perspective on mental illness.
- We started to have a steady flow of these experimental programs with some clear feedback from the attendees. At the same time, we were talking with an attorney about liability and legal concerns we had. I wanted to also communicate clearly to the congregation everything that we had going on.
- With so much activity, questions and small projects, we needed a way to focus the group of volunteers and allow them to see what we’ve accomplished and what was still needed. We also needed to not re-explain the wellness center and at every meeting. So this update template served as: a friendly reminder, a monthly meeting agenda and an appeal for help depending on who was reading it at the time.
- It became clear that this was a large effort. Some of the volunteers that came to meetings, could only visit for updates and not actually take an active role. I thought the group would value actually seeing the open roles, and be given the opportunity to choose one that felt well defined and manageable from a perspective of time and responsibilities.
- I created these small commitment cards detailing what open roles we had on the team, the responsibilities those roles entailed and the approx. time commitment needed for each role. My thought was that volunteers who showed up monthly would take those commitments. Project Manager: Keep in sync with Vision Team and RCCPC needs. Take and share notes of meetings, lead meeting agenda if chair person is unavailable; 2-4 hours monthly Events Coordinator (2 members needed): Keep wellness calendar for church's website, books and organize speakers and training; 1-4 hours monthly Support Group and Professional & Hospital Outreach Lead: Find opportunities for licensed professionals or larger organizations to partner with us or start groups. Find non-professionals who have a calling to lead groups and facilitate training; 2-4 hours monthly Charitable Foundation & Public Relations Lead: Start the process of possibly setting up The Wellness Center as a 5013C Charity as well as a process for accepting donations. Reach out to media outlets about our mission, edit public blog posts, assist charity functions; 1-4 hours monthly Research Helper: Conduct user research for a journey map per major support group; 1-4 hours monthly
- With regular meetings and volunteers taking roles we were able to focus on our vision. This vision is how we want the church to change in the future. Through a wellness center we imagine things will be different in this way.
- How we achieve that vision is our mission.
- We expanded our Who We Are statement to make sense across different audiences.
- Setting design and messaging principles is a great start to developing the marketing for programs and information sessions.
- Speaking of programs, this is a comprehensive list of programs the wellness center has or will try to run in the future. Right now, they are focused mostly on monthly seminars and information sessions. These sessions could lay groundwork for bigger and more focused programs.
- The last ingredient in this, is the most dominant, the most important. Everything or nothing happens with this.
- I guess you could say I identify as a survivor of mental illness...as someone recovering. And with that I’m looking for some meaning to the confusion, heartache, violence and loss of life.
- Here are a few more words from Gail.
- How does modern religion, churches, synagogues, mosques or temples show love and are ultimately perceived?
- Consider what you all can do to setup your own rebel alliance for love.
- These next steps may be a good way to start. (read)
- Thank you for your time! I welcome feedback, ideas and questions.
- Defining a New Service As we bring a service to life, we also need to define the new roles and systems necessary to create it. Here are some of the things that we have sought to define: Criteria for support group leaders We are working with Mental Health Associations to generate a list of qualities that people who lead support groups should have before they claim a role as the facilitator in order to vet our potential leaders. A screening procedure Potential attendees will likely need to be vetted to first determine if they may need serious medical attention. A scheduling system We will need some type of software or analog calendar system to receive interested participants and help leaders establish detailed schedules including times, places, and rooms within our campus to hold group meetings. Visual and physical design affordances Many mental states of distress can cause tunnel vision. When designing our outdoor spaces–including way-finding graphics and indoor signage, as well as digital experiences and printed material–we are seeking to keep the participant in mind. Using these processes, we have reached consensus that we can agree on, recall, and own, and have built a foundation to move forward in effectively designing human-centered services. Ideas have not been decreed through rank or hierarchy, but have been nurtured and crafted through compromise and a shared understanding. Direction has been be solidified in hours rather than weeks or months, and follow-through to implementation can happen quickly and reliably when working with experienced people who have a personal commitment see it succeed.