Outstanding Corporate Citizenship Awards Q&A

EveryMind
Outstanding Corporate Citizen of the Year Nonprofit of the Year Nominee
 
What is your mission and vision?
EveryMind strengthens communities and empowers individuals to reach optimal mental wellness. EveryMind has been a trusted mental health resource for more than 60 years with programs and services that bring healing, hope and wholeness to children, youth, adults, veterans, and families. Additionally, EveryMind’s work in education, and crisis prevention and intervention supports the entire community and saves lives every day.
                   
EveryMind provides community education, advocacy, and direct services to empower the entire community to reach optimal mental wellness. We were known as Mental Health Association until September 2016, when we conducted an intentional process to reimagine the way we describe and deliver our services. Our new name, EveryMind, conveys the impact of our work and breaks down the stigma surrounding mental illness. EveryMind opens the conversation about mental health and makes way for healing and wholeness. Our highly trained, caring, professional staff continue to provide all of the services our community has come to depend on. While EveryMind provides services throughout the entire National Capital Region, our services typically target the community’s most vulnerable and low-income residents. In the past year, EveryMind provided direct services to more than 12,500 individuals.
 
How does your organization achieve its mission?
EveryMind’s programs and services are directed at reducing the stigma associated with mental illness and ensuring our entire community has the resources they need to reach optimal mental wellness. These programs include: Friendly Visitor, which combats loneliness and isolation among our seniors; Linkages to Learning, which helps at-risk students improve in school; Representative Payee, which helps disabled and elderly individuals manage their finances; ServingTogether, our commitment to veterans; case management and counseling services for children, youth, adults and families; and crisis prevention and intervention services for the entire community.
 
EveryMind continually adapts its programming and outreach to meet the changing needs of our community. For example, EveryMind’s crisis prevention and intervention services incorporated text and chat services into our longstanding crisis hotline to better meet the communication preferences of the youth in our community. Furthermore, to address the needs of the over 300,000 veterans living in the National Capital Region and struggling to transition back to civilian life, EveryMind launched ServingTogether in 2011. ServingTogether is building a collaborative and trusted network of organizations to improve access to needed services for veterans, service members and their families.
 
How have your programs directly impacted the regional community?
EveryMind has the deepest impact in Northern Virginia through ServingTogether a collective-impact model designed to provide guidance to service members, veterans, and their families on accessing the resources and support they need through a coordinated system of care with nonprofits, community organizations, businesses, and government entities. ServingTogether has been successfully working in Montgomery County for the past six years. Building upon this success, Serving Together expanded its work into Northern Virginia two years ago.
 
To bring together local services, ServingTogether launched Veteran Collaboratives in Fairfax and Loudoun Counties which allow informal networking among community members to increase the communication of quality programs and events for veterans.

ServingTogether’s comprehensive website, ServingTogetherProject.org, includes information and a searchable resource directory of local, state, regional, and federal resources. Veteran Peer Navigators provide one-on-one support to veterans seeking resources such as employment, housing, financial assistance, or benefits support. Serving Together also seeks to increase community education on topics relevant to providers serving the military and veteran populations.
 
In addition, EveryMind has trained staff and volunteers available to provide free and confidential crisis prevention and intervention services through telephone, text and chat services.