Youth Create Wholeness

Mission

Youth Create Wholeness is the youth program of VOCAL (the Virginia Organization of Consumers Asserting Leadership). We are run by and for youth with mental health disabilities in Virginia, with input from elders and allies.

Our mission is to empower youth with mental health disabilities to transform their communities and selves. We encourage youth to define and discover their own paths to recovery and wellness, and provide the tools to work within the mental health system as well as to build alternative systems of support. We do this work through sharing our own experiences and knowledge. We build power and community through self-expression.

We know that our identities as people who have experienced emotional turbulence, mental health crisis, or extreme states of consciousness (commonly labeled as "mental illness”) are lived in context of our background. We are not just our diagnoses or our lack of diagnosis; we are human beings and we are complex. We know that only by affirming our lives and experiences as people with different kinds of dis/abilities, people of many faiths or none, people of color and indigenous people, poor and working class people, and people with varying expressions of sexual orientation and gender identity, can we integrate ourselves and our communities and live in wholeness.

We learn from our elders and from each other's diverse experiences and we pass on what we know. We affirm that creating wholeness is a living process of individual and community transformation.