Wellness Wordworks’ mission is to spread the idea that emotional distress is temporary and transformative. We provide research, artwork, peer support, and programs to model this change in our approach to mental health care. Our organization is composed primarily of board members, staff, and volunteers who have been labeled with mental health diagnoses but have emerged to find complete recovery, according to various different definitions of recovery.
We are using Google Gigabit 100 times faster internet technology that is only available in Kansas City. Our goal is create a self-funding mental health program to remove the need for government and charity funding. We can create a profitable interaction involving only our business and our direct customers. Very few people in the mental health world have ever done this, and making it work will have powerful reverberations around the world. The business is currently incorporated as an LLC. We are working on a “B” or benefit incorporation, which means that social good is our primary goal. We are a social entrepreneurship, with 10 design innovations essential to marketing to people in poverty.
Self-funding mental health logo showing the humanity and healing on our hands. Designed by Rod Mc Bride
How we named our self-funding mental health approach:
Our name, Wellness Wordworks, symbolizes the healing coming through the words of our peers as we form and share recovery stories and our powerful and spoken word poetry. We also mean that building wellness is hard work, and not a passive process that someone can do for anyone else. Our business’ current income sources include state and federal grants, social messaging and content creation contracts, product sales, and speaking honoraria. We anticipate that the self-funding mental health approach will be fully realized in four to five years as the business components mature.
Wellness Wordworks was founded in 2008 by Corinna West, a Certified Peer Specialist. She is a recovery movement civil rights advocate with 7 years of experience in the mental health industry. She was a 1996 Olympic Judo Team member and has a masters degree in Pharmaceutical Chemistry. You find more of her personal views, recovery stories, and bicycling adventures on her personal blog, http://corinnawest.com. Wellness Wordworks partners with over 25 other Kansas City and national mental health care, art, and advocacy organizations.
Our logo:
Our logo is a hand with a scar. This shows how we can reach out through our most difficult times, through what has shaped us, to help other people. Our hand is the most basic and human element that we have, and we can keep reaching out even if our darkest moments. We help people walk through the fire and come out completely stronger and more powerful people. We know. We’ve done it.
Vote on a different view for complete mental health recovery:
Our organization promotes an alternative views of emotional struggles that point toward immediate and inexpensive solutions.
Disease model view of “mental illness.”
The current view of emotional distress is that extreme mental states come from a genetic or chemical or structural brain different that has become activated in certain people. Viewing mental health struggles as a disease with physical causes leads to a feeling of permanence and separation from society. The purely biological explanation for “mental illness” has been shown to reduce hope and increase fear of people with these labels.
The Distress or social or temporary model of emotional suffering:
Instead, we search for the source of emotional suffering in people’s current or past life situations. Problems like poor self-care, lack of connection with society, spiritual crises, poor job fit, lack of exercise, or problems with nutrition are all temporary and relatively easy to fix. Past trauma issues, physical or mental, cause many people to lose touch with reality. Also, some people have more energy than others and can pay attention to tasks in a different manner than other. This may not be an illness, but simply a diversity in the way we exist. Some people can get caught in feedback loops like not sleeping, eating, or socializing enough, and the more these problems happen the more likely they are to happen.
We need a name for this kind of model! Please vote on a name here to describe our approach.
Connect with us!
Our social media sources: