Mental Health Partnerships

Mental Health Partnerships was founded, and continues to thrive, on the basic principle that people with mental health conditions can and do recover because they have the resilience to direct their own journeys in overcoming significant adversity. And while recovery—in all its different forms and paths—is possible for all, there’s a greater chance for recovery in the context of an informed, caring community with family, friends and peers involved. Based on this conviction, we’ve spearheaded changes over six decades that have helped transform mental health services locally, statewide and across the country—all to be more responsive to the priorities set by those served. Not only did our organization play a key role in shutting down state mental hospitals, we ensured that over a hundred million dollars was then infused into community-based mental health services. A big part of that was the creation of Community Behavioral Health (CBH), a city-run entity established to manage behavioral health services under HealthChoices—Pennsylvania’s mandatory managed care plan for Medical Assistance recipients—for some 450,000 Philadelphians who receive Medicaid. And MHP advocacy was vital to the successful effort in the late 1990s to prevent the takeover of CBH by for-profit managed care organizations. MHP was also the first in the Pennsylvania to provide peer-to-peer mental health services from neighborhood drop-in centers, which have evolved into our recovery learning centers, based on what used to be considered a radical idea: that people in recovery could help others with mental health conditions in their respective paths toward recovery by example and through mutual support. Since establishing ourselves as a nonprofit in 1951 as the Mental Health Association of Southeastern Pennsylvania, we now provide more than 40 direct services not just in Philadelphia and the four surrounding counties, but also in South Jersey and the State of Delaware.