An introduction to the idea of a Consumer Developed Initiative (CDI)

1. Philosophy

The philosophy behind our commitment to Consumer Developed Initiatives: (CDIs) is primarily that people diagnosed with mental illness,

• can do things -plenty of things. To write off people with psychiatric disabilities as unfortunate, victims, incapable of learning new things, incapable of holding down paid work, or lacking in intellect, commitment or promise is to do them a great injustice

• achieve great things when they decide on the agenda and what they want to do and achieve in the world, and when their lives are not seen through a prism of illness or someone else's constant need to see them as fodder for therapeutic intervention

• can achieve more if they join together and work towards goals pre-determined by the group. Our emphasis is on groups rather than individuals

• like everyone else, have gaps in their understanding of important information. Some of us shudder at the thought of modern technology or how to write a submission or draft a report for a funding body. We know that for some consumers there are bigger gaps in our education either because of our experiences of episodic mental illness or society's reaction to it. Filling these gaps in education and skill can be a great thing to do if it is done competently and respectfully and driven by people who have had consumer experience.

2. Principles

There are four primary principles that guide our commitment to CDIs:

• Mental health consumer groups, like all other community groups and organisations, need resources if they are going to survive and thrive. At Our Consumer Place we do not provide money but we do provide guidance and resources which will help groups to find money if that's what they want

• We recognise that maintaining a group, particularly a group that is divided on central issues or under significant financial distress or has dwindling attendances and unevenly shared workloads, requires support that goes beyond the provision of written material - no matter how comprehensive. We provide individual assistance to all mental health consumer groups through a variety of face-to-face, telephone and computer resources. We work with many experts at Our Community and we will make use of their resources.

• We are interactive. Our website has been designed to enable maximum participation from grassroots consumer groups and very experienced consumer organisations in Victoria. To the best of our ability we will respond quickly to the feedback we receive.

• Although our website is comprehensive and vital to the configuration of Our Consumer Place, it is not the only tool we provide as a resource centre. Our training and education arm is central to a gamut of capacity building opportunities, including meetings with individual groups to describe our website and how to get the most out of it, conferences, bringing groups together that have similar problems, and helping groups with research if this is needed.

3. Difference between a CDI and CDS and why we are using the term CDI

Originally we were funded to provide a resource centre for Consumer Delivered Services (CDS). Early on, we decided to change the title to Consumer Developed Initiatives. There were several reasons for doing this.

• The term Consumer Delivered Services (CDS) implied that the activity of consumer groups would (and perhaps should) be most obvious and active within the mental illness sector itself, either providing services in clinical and non-government settings or to consumers about issues to do with consumer consultancy, activism, systems change and so on. Although we recognised that this is one essential setting in the minds of many consumers who come together, we wanted our initiative to have greater scope.

• Consumer Delivered Services also implied a service-type structure for consumer groups and we were unhappy about this emphasis. We were not comfortable with the implication of a service structure with people at different levels of seniority, with tensions between paid and unpaid work and often responding to the agenda of organisations for whom the consumer services would be provided.

• Consumer Delivered Services seemed to us to imply that amongst consumers there were those who were the receivers of services and those who were the imparters of services. This is not how we wanted to promote Our Consumer Place. We are not running away from the reality that there are consumers who have become experts in certain areas of traditional consumer work such as advocacy, research, education, policy development etc., or that have special mental health/system experiences to impart; rather, we wanted to move towards a model that was about inclusion and knowledge sharing, mentoring and the provision of opportunities rather than services.

• Consumer Developed Initiatives (CDIs) also worked for us because the term 'developed' felt inclusive (doing things together) and more respectful of the skills and knowledge and differing expertise of everyone - a jointly-owned 'work in progress'.

4. Scope

Initiatives can be tiny and they can be quite ambitious. We wanted CDIs to reflect this. Community Developed Initiative is a useful term because it widens the legitimate activity of groups. Our agenda for widening the scope is threefold:

• We wanted to include and encourage groups and sub-groups who want to meet around issues of great love as well as great sadness or great anger. We believe this is imperative. We want to support groups who are doing arty things, crafty things, singing things, sporting things, joyful and caring things for each other.

• We wanted to introduce the idea of reciprocity. That is, consumer groups supporting disadvantaged groups in their local community with a variety of initiatives, e.g:
  • supporting another 'charity' and thus being the givers instead of the receivers,
  • doing up bicycles for other consumers who don't have any transport .
  The ideas are endless and reflect the fact that consumers are demanding inclusion in the local community rather than waiting for it to just happen. Consumers frequently talk about the empowerment of reciprocity. Few of us feel comfortable always being on the receiving end and the idea of diverse initiatives enables us to give voice to this idea.

• We also wanted to introduce the legitimacy of initiatives like fighting for important local or global issues that members feel strongly about. The group or a sub-group might want to fight for environmental issues, the rights of a local indigenous group, world poverty or keeping the local library in a rural town. These are all initiatives.

5. Multi-interest initiatives

Groups don't need to be only one thing. For example:

A group that originally started out as a support group for people with a diagnosed mental illness might be interested in certain mental health issues as well as involved in other artistic, musical, political, civic or community concerns. This is the very essence if an initiative rather than a service. Nonetheless, there is no reason why one or several initiatives of the group might not be services of various kinds - servicing the community, the sector, local schools or the local library.

The final reason that we wanted to use the term Consumer Developed Initiatives is that it does not (as a Consumer Delivered Service does) imply that the activities that take place involve only people who use mental health services of one kind or another. Many might but others need to feel invited and included. This term allows for the inclusion of a diverse range of people, for example:

• More radical consumers (who often call themselves survivors) who would never use a traditional mental health service except under The Act when they have no legal choice;
• People who do not relate to the term 'mental illness' but still get something out of the group and want to stay engaged;
• People who use a variety of services that are not traditional mental health services. These would include various healers, counselling services, feminist practitioners, co-counselling, alternative medicine of various kinds and so on.
• People who have problems related to mental distress but who might have greater difficulty accessing traditional mental health support groups because 'mental illness' is sometimes not the reason for their 'groupness'. Here we include ex-prisoners, survivors of violent crime, survivors of domestic violence, survivors of childhood abuse, neglect and trauma, survivors of refugee camps and torture, etc. We believe that the idea of a Consumer Developed Initiative can be a multi-group event that brings the community together.

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