Our Values

Deliver High Quality Programs

We apply research and lessons from practice to equip social service providers with relevant, actionable behavioral health tools.

  • Promote individual and organizational skill gains and practice changes through training, ongoing coaching, and implementation support
  • Apply implementation science, best practices in adult learning, and relevant behavioral health research
  • Co-design programs that respond to real situations providers encounter, settings they work in, and communities they serve
  • Provide opportunities for skills practice, reflection, knowledge building, questioning, rest, connection, and joy
  • Create paths to continued learning, career advancement, or academic credit for Academy learners

Center Community Capabilities

We center the diverse expertise, relationships, and healing practices in communities and community-based organizations. We locate power to improve behavioral health in these community capabilities.

  •  Recognize that people who live closest to systemic harms hold unique expertise to design and lead solutions
  • Acknowledge the personal and collective dimensions of harm and healing
  • Affirm the practice-based wisdom, strengths, and skills social service providers bring
  • Invite behavioral health specialists into new relationships with communities and community-based organizations centered on shared learning, capacity building, and coordinated care
  • Advance multidisciplinary solutions that bridge community expertise, Indigenous knowledge about care and wellbeing, and relevant research
  • Translate promising strategies into practice in community settings

Address Systemic Harms

We seek to identify, acknowledge, and reduce harms related to racism and other systemic inequalities through our programming and partnerships.

  • Acknowledge that historic and contemporary racism and other structural inequalities cause pain and drive related social, economic, health, and behavioral health disparities
  • Build knowledge and skills for community care, including by identifying and challenging anti-Black racism and other forms of violence or discrimination
  • Honor the diverse and nuanced experiences of people and communities most impacted
  • Connect community behavioral health to insights and practices from racial, social, and economic justice movements
  • Uplift practitioners and scholars who advance tools for countering the mental health impacts of inequality, based on their lived experience and work in community settings
  • Partner with providers to counter racism and structural inequality within social service and behavioral health organizations and systems

Support Agency and Growth

We believe behavioral health and social services can and should expand self-determination and promote healing, growth, and joy.

  • Equip social service providers to understand, engage, and support people affected by trauma or behavioral health issues
  • Advance affirming, person-centered, strengths-based services that build the power of individuals and communities to make decisions and act in line with their own values and goals
  • Strengthen continuums of behavioral health care in community settings, from prevention and health promotion to identification, treatment, recovery, and growth
  • Expand our understanding of pathways to healing to include organizing, collective action, and other helpful practices