Building Bridges in the Community

Building Bridges in the Community      by Margot Cioccio

I went to a meeting yesterday about helping the mentally ill of our city. The meeting was attended by my Covenant Pastor and his wife, a Lutheran Pastor,  Folks from a Methodist Church and folks from their feeding ministry. There were some folks who work with the mentally ill as a profession, a police officer and a city official and me and I felt quite unofficial but sent by God none the less.

The meeting was not really what I had expected. I thought I was going to get some desperately needed training to better work with the mentally ill who we see at our weekly feeding. Well the meeting was more of an introductory discussion made up of others who care about the poor, homeless and mentally ill in our city.  The meeting was good in that I think we will be able to pool some of our resources to better serve the mentally ill homeless. We may be able to collectively become something that can attain some grants to provide training, support and better help to the mentally ill. We hope to get some training to better recognize the various types of mental illness and to be better able to help people before they are forced to get help because the have had a run in with the law or landed in  the hospital.
Sadly it seems nation wide our city has only gets a C for its ability to help the mentally ill and may quickly be back to a D with the loss of funding due to difficult economic times unless we can somehow work together. 

I thought it was interesting that the non church folks in the room realized the value of the church and our ability to help provide encouragement, stability and to connect people to resources on the frontlines. They saw the need for us and our volunteers to have more training to help connect these folks with the resources that are out there but often un tapped.  I think they may have actually heard our request for a position to be made for mental health workers to be available and on site at our feedings.  So it seems the meeing that I had hoped to attend yesterday will actually happen in the near furture. We talked about the possibility of video tapeing the training because the volunteers we see are not the same from week to week and would be unlikely to attend such a traing. It will be quite valuable for those of us who are on the front lines.

I think that perhaps some bridges of coopeation and understanding were estabished - and that is always a good thing.