Baystate Wing Hospital Awards $30,000 In Grants

Baystate Wing Hospital Awards $30,000 In Grants

By 
June 17, 2022

PALMER  Baystate Wing Hospital has announced an investment of $30,000 in grants to benefit local community-based nonprofit organizations. The grant awards were given to the Quaboag Valley Community Development Corporation, the Quaboag Connector to support local transportation in the region, the Ware Fire Department to support Emergency Medical Services (EMS) and paramedic training, and to the Ware Regional Recovery Center to increased access to support and expand knowledge about recovery support services and resources in the region.

“Everyone is strengthened when we work together to build and sustain a culture of health and wellness within our communities,” said Molly Gray, president and chief administrative officer for Baystate Health’s Eastern Region, which includes Baystate Wing Hospital and Baystate Mary Lane Outpatient Center. “We are very happy to support the work with our community partners with these grant investments.”

[…]

Growing Strong: Ware Regional Recovery Center’s Next Chapter

The $3500 grant to the Ware Regional Recovery Center, a program of the Western Massachusetts Training Consortium, will support their work in the Quaboag Hills Region to respond with increased momentum in raising community awareness about local access to recovery support and resources, to decrease stigma and to encourage people to seek out recovery support services in a time of critical need.

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Agency Receives Funding to Support Survivors of Violence

Montague Reporter
By Christina Trinchero
June 2, 2022

FRANKLIN COUNTY – The Salasin Project, a program of the Western Massachusetts Training Consortium, recently received a $127,000 grant from the Massachusetts COVID-19 Survivor Trust Fund to expand its work with Franklin and Hampshire County residents who have experienced the multiple and complex issues related to domestic violence.

Through partnerships with area social service agencies, the grant funding will be used to implement a support group in Spanish and to hire an advocate to increase access to housing and economic empowerment for individuals experiencing domestic violence.

[…]

The Salasin Project will collaborate with Alianza DV Services, a domestic violence program in Holyoke, to support Hampden County participants interested in moving to Hampshire or Franklin counties.

“Searching for housing can be overwhelming,” says Alianza executive director Carmen Nieves, “especially when someone has experienced violence.” The programs will join forces to help survivors relocate.

“With this funding, we will be able to hire a full-time housing advocate who can work with participants to find safe housing and move,” Lockwood says, noting the lack of affordable housing can be a “significant barrier” to someone leaving an abusive relationship. […]

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Human Service Forum’s Community Builders Celebration Recognizes Consortium Community Leaders

Thank you to Human Service Forum for recognizing some of our amazing community leaders at Home and Community Connection, Northampton Recovery Center and the Support Network during their Community Builder Celebration event on May 25th! According to the Human Service Forum, these are people who make all feel welcome, working collaboratively for the good of the community while helping others to be their best. We are SO proud of you all!

Honored as Community Builders in Western Massachusetts:
  • Home and Community Connections employees: Anita Cross, Sharna Pearson and Renee Marshal
  • Northampton Recovery Center employees: John Sullivan, Trevor Dayton and Dan Bickford
  • Support Network employees: Jan Lamberg and Shawna Osman

Learn more about their work in creating conditions for innovation, growth, and connection at their pages below!

Home and Community Connections

Northampton Recovery Center

Support Network

 

Data shows local opioid deaths soaring amid pandemic

Data shows local opioid deaths soaring amid pandemic

By CHRIS LARABEE
Staff Writer
Published: 5/24/2022 5:15:26

[…]

The Community Opportunity, Network, Navigation, Exploration and Connection Team (CONNECT) is a 24/7 rapid response team created by the Opioid Task Force and a partnership that includes The RECOVER Project, Tapestry, law enforcement from 30 area communities, the Children’s Advocacy Center of Franklin County and North Quabbin, and the North Quabbin Recovery Center, among others.

Sarah Ahern, also a peer recovery coach with The RECOVER Project, emphasized that numbers are more than just data — each point on a graph represents the end of a human life and the unquantifiable grief that shrouds families and communities in the wake of an overdose.

“You can look at data numbers — those are human beings, those are people, those are somebody’s brother, sister, mother, father, cousin, aunt, uncle, grandfather,” Ahern said sitting next to Daignault in The RECOVER Project’s office. “Those people were loved by their family and we talk about these losses. They’re human lives and the weight of that is heavy.” […]

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Spring Medicinal and Pollinator Plant Sales

Spring Medicinal and Pollinator Plant Sales

Looking to add some new green to your garden? People’s Medicine Project is sharing plant seedlings with people who attend our free clinics and community groups that are planting medicinal gardens.  Your purchase of plants helps fund this work towards herbal accessibility for all.

Find People’s Medicine Project’s plant sales at the following locations:

Conway

Location: People’s Medicine Apothecary, 204 Bardwell’s Ferry Rd Conway MA

Dates:

  • Fri May 27th 12-6pm
  • Sat May 28th 9am-12pm
  • Friday June 3rd 12-6pm

Northampton

Location: Mxed Greens Apothecary, 2 Conz St #20 Northampton MA

Dates: May 26-30 daily 12-6pm

Check out their Facebook and Instagram for an updated list of available plants before each sale, or email:  [email protected].

 

Doctors Gave Her Antipsychotics. She Decided to Live With Her Voices.

Doctors Gave Her Antipsychotics. She Decided to Live With Her Voices.

By Daniel Bergner
May 17, 2022
New York Times

[…]

Around that time, in the late 2000s, when Mazel-Carlton was in her mid-20s, a new position arose in mental health: peer-support specialist, someone with what’s known as lived experience who works alongside practitioners. The idea is that peers can better win the trust of people who are struggling. For Mazel-Carlton, a series of these low-paying roles took her, in 2012, to Holyoke, Mass., once home to more than 25 paper mills, now one of the poorest places in the state. There, she went to work for a fledgling peer-run organization that is now called the Wildflower Alliance, with a three-room headquarters above a desolate downtown street and a goal of transforming the way our society understands and treats extreme mental distress.

She began leading Hearing Voices Network support groups — which are somewhat akin to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings — for people with auditory and visual hallucinations. The groups, with no clinicians in the room, gathered on secondhand chairs and sofas in humble spaces rented by the alliance. What psychiatry terms psychosis, the Hearing Voices Movement refers to as nonconsensus realities, and a bedrock faith of the movement is that filling a room with talk of phantasms will not infuse them with more vivid life or grant them more unshakable power. Instead, partly by lifting the pressure of secrecy and diminishing the feeling of deviance, the talk will loosen the hold of hallucinations and, crucially, the grip of isolation.

Mazel-Carlton also worked as a sometime staff member at Afiya house, a temporary residence run by the alliance as an alternative to locked wards. The people who stay at Afiya are in dire need; many are not only in mental disarray but also homeless. Many are suicidal. There are no clinicians on staff, no security personnel, only people who know such desperation firsthand. In the living room, a homemade banner declares: “Holding multiple truths. Knowing that everyone has their own accurate view of the way things are.”

A decade after her arrival in Holyoke, Mazel-Carlton and the Wildflower Alliance are now leaders in a growing effort to thoroughly reform how the field of mental health approaches severe psychiatric conditions. […]

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