Major Announcements on the Direction of the Mental Health Project

Release from Faiz Jan

​So [Faiz], Kirsten and Joy have decided to spin this off into a broader independent movement which will campaign for a coalition of organizations (of course including the RSU) while mobilizing grassroots support simultaneously.

There are two main reasons we made this decision:
1. When there is no independent charter of sorts to guide a project that is supposed to be coalitional, it often ends up being unilateral in nature as opposed to cooperative as intended since external organizations do not see themselves as equal. This solves that problem by framing everyone as equal.

2. As the three of us, who were leading the project, leave our respective organizations but wish to continue this push for expanding mental healthcare and the policy demands we presented earlier and again, it seems natural to try to disassociate the project from being bound to those organizations so that we can continue to pursue action and not let the project die.

What does this mean? Well in the next few weeks, we have set up meetings to form connections for this "new" form of the project and we will be re-branding it entirely. We will bring in representatives of the Union, OSTA-AECO, the TYC, YHY and other coalition members to negotiations meetings and beginning in September and after the election, we will begin a sweeping push for our movement to attract grounds.

What about the connection to the Union? The Union will always and forever be a core coalition member and leader, so anyone who wishes can still be active in the campaign and the participatory democracy model of the project will remain the same but with incorporation of many other organizations as well.