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. if we go public, we are looking at a “B”  or benefit incorporation model. This means that social good is our primary goal.  We are a social entrepreneurship, with 10 design innovations essential to marketing to people in poverty.

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.