S2: Southwest Solutions of Detroit#50

 Southwest Solutions of Detroit Romy interviews John Van Kamp of Southwest Solutions. John has been the leader and visionary of Southwest Solutions since 1973 and has successfully established a village of partners to address mental health issues. The incredible collaboration and partnering  led initiatives into entrepreneurship and other related systemic change. This is an incredible story of community partnering and change!    John Van Kamp, Southwest Solutions   Read Full Transcript Full transcription Romy: We are here with John Van Kamp at Southwest Solutions in Detroit, welcome John. John: Well, I’m very pleased to be here, thanks very much for coming here. John: And for this interview, I really appreciate. Romy: So, let's first give a feel of what Southwest solutions is. John: Sure, at this point and time we would see that we are a family of agencies that are in partnerships with others, working in Detroit’s neighborhoods. Both at the people level and at the place level. But it probably takes a story from the beginning, because when we started we had ten staff and we now have about five hundred. So, it’s a story of the evolution that brings sense as to what we are. Romy: Yeah, I really want to unpack this a little bit. Just real quick at a service level, you said you work with people and places in the neighborhoods, is it veterans mostly that you work with or all kinds, right? John: Yeah, it’s with all kinds. I mean, we really started in 1972 as a small community mental health agency. It was not long after the Kennedy administration had created the concept of community mental health and it put together a funding model for community mental health, and Monsignor Clement Kern and Rev. Bill Moldwin and Rev. George Veneto, by Faustino Romero, Snoal and others, saw the concept of community mental health and saw the dollars available. They did a lot of work, and we opened our doors in 1972, with a staff of ten and a budget of two hundred thousand. John: So that’s where we started. I shouldn’t say we because I didn’t start until 1973. I started as a grad student from Wayne State in the school of social work, community organizing and placed with the agency. But what attracted me and not only the clinicians but kind of some the community oriented people is that context of community mental health. It started with mental health rather than mental illness. So, the treatment of somebody’s mental illness is a key part of mental health but so is housing, so is healthcare. John: So is a job, so is education. All of those things are a part of, if you will, my emotional well-being or my mental health. Romy: Yeah, definitely. John: But community mental health, what they realized is that because of the myths and the stereotypes and the stigma about mental illness, those community values are in a community and people either open them up or don’t. John: So they divided the country into catchment areas to implant a community mental health agency in each. So you could work in a community context to have the community open up their values to their brothers and sisters who had a mental illness. So we started at the very beginning. John: Creating a system of care for people with mental illness. What that meant is we came to the table, providing treatment services, but we had to find healthcare. We had to find housing; we had to find workforce development. And in that, some things we partnered, and some things we did ourselves. But when you realize you can...