NAMI National Education Reorganizes

Changes to take place in training, field services, training and peer support
From NAMI National by Staff Writer, February 10, 2011

Joyce Burland will be leaving her role as director of NAMI's Education, Training and Peer Support Center at the end of July 2011. We hope you can come to the Convention in Chicago to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Joyce's brainchild and NAMI's cornerstone program: Family-to-Family.

We have also taken steps to reorganize the Education Center so that we can continue to serve as effectively as possible. We are historically organized by individual programs, adding a director and program center as each new program came on board. However, the things you are asking for in the field are common to all of our programs—technical assistance, advice on problems shared by every program, timely updates, data reporting, training, etc. Given this commonality, it doesn't make much sense for us to make a distinction between family and consumer programs any longer, or stay in our silos working separately on program issues shared by all of our programs.

Therefore, we have decided to reorganize by function—specifically, the function of technical assistance, the function of curricula and training and the function of internal project direction. This is how it will look:

Lynne Saunders, Director of Field Services (with an emphasis on family and Veterans programs)

Cynthia Evans. Director of Field Services (with an emphasis on consumer programs)

Lynne and Cynthia will focus on technical assistance and support to the field across all programs, including continuing education in program leadership and management.

Teri Brister, Director of Training (with an emphasis on family, child and adolescent programs)

Sarah O'Brien, Director of Training (with an emphasis on consumer programs)

Teri and Sarah will focus on training, program content and updates, and will be responsible for repurposing existing programs into virtual formats.

Candita Sabavala, Departmental Project Director

Candita will work with departmental directors and staff to provide project oversight and direct supervision of support staff to ensure all departmental deliverables are met.

Maura Bulger and Carmen Argueta will continue as our indispensable departmental Coordinators, responsible for support functions across programs, with Carmen taking on the additional role of Spanish Language Specialist. In their support role as departmental assistants, Blakelee Sharpe will be in charge of document management, and Marshall Epstein will manage the demanding task of order fulfillment for all programs.

This reorganization plan means there will be some significant shifts in how we work together. For us, like many of you already running several NAMI programs from your desks, it means we must become program “generalists” (good news: we have actually been working on cross-training for some time.) For you, it means learning to contact us in our new functions, rather than in our specific prior roles as program directors.

As we move forward, we want to assure you that there is really “no wrong door” in contacting us: We are still dedicated to serving you the best way we can, and we will as we always have, learn these new steps together. Our annual state calls to you will commence next month, giving us an opportunity to review all these changes with you. In the meantime, we greatly appreciate your understanding as we put these changes into place.

--The staff of the Education, Training and Peer Support Center

Source: NAMI National

Link: http://www.nami.org