Our Story and Our Covenant
The UNITARIAN UNIVERSALIST MENTAL HEALTH NETWORK is committed to sharing lived experience, time, and resources as we live into our mission: To empower the Beloved Community in honoring each individual’s unique mental health journey towards wellness.
In 2018 several individual Unitarian Universalists interested in mental health started meeting and jointly and decided that the time was right to form a Unitarian Universalists Mental Health Network to work collectively on mental health challenges that affect our congregations and society at large.
A video that gives our vision, focus areas, and status:
For more history see:
Covenant for the UU Mental Health Network
We come together as an organization of Unitarian Universalists dedicated to making our vision a reality in our congregations and the wider UU Community.
Toward that aim, we proclaim these promises to each other:
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We recognize each person as unique and beloved.
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We recognize that there is a vast diversity of experiences of mental health - each as distinct as a fingerprint.
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We acknowledge the complexities and challenges that exist in mental health systems of care. We honor individual choice as our first principle. As such, we neither espouse nor reject any single approach to wellness for one’s body, mind, emotions or spirit.
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We acknowledge the presence of dysfunction and injustice in the current US mental health system, and that access to quality care is a justice issue
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We seek to recognize the intersectionality of mental health issues and other claimed and lived identities, and how this adversely impacts access to care and inclusion.
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We seek to build cross-disability alliances to share experience and strategy
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We are intentionally anti-racist, counter-oppressive, multi-cultural, and de-centering of white supremacist and oppressive systems.
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We see you. We hear you. We honor your experiences as real and valid.
When the covenant has been broken, we will figure out how to get back into covenant. The person who has broken the covenant will work with others in the covenanted community to determine what needs to be done in terms of forgiveness and reconciliation to get back into covenant.