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NAMI Austin Advocacy Planning: News about Important Dates to put on your calendar

Cathy Weaver is the new NAMI Austin Legislative and Governmental Liaison chair, and she has asked me to let you know the great opportunities ahead for focusing our NAMI Austin advocacy efforts.

Here are the dates that you will want to save on your calendar as we step into this new Legislative Session:

Thursday, Jan 29, 2-3:30pm

Location:

4th floor Board Room, Admissions Building
ASH campus (entrance on Guadalupe at 40th street)

Purpose:

to get an update on plans for this session; to expand the working group and develop many working teams of 3 people each who will meet with legislators and staffers

(more details follow)

Tuesday, Feb. 3, 6:30-9pm

Location:

Meet at Room E1.014 to catch tour of the State Capitol by Chuck and Phil

Purpose:

to get “an insider’s tour” of the Capitol and to distribute & discuss important materials for the process

Wednesday, March 4th for Mental Health, 9am-4:00pm

Location:

State Capitol,
AM: special training session regarding this session
LUNCH provided
PM: legislative appointments and visits
3:30-4 reports & wrap-up

Purpose:

Capitol Day - for the mental health coalition of NAMI Austin, NAMI Texas, DBSA, and MHA

PLEASE REPLY and LET US KNOW which of these upcoming meetings you are able to attend.

The meeting of Thursday 1/29: The committee will be finalizing plans of the team work efforts that will include setting appointments with legislators for the Capitol Day on March 4th, as well as discussing the NAMI Austin legislative agenda and how to deliver the message. We will have some very specific work in honing the message as we learned in our November Advocacy Training Day. (If you missed that day, please join our efforts anyway, as there will be many ways for you to get the benefit of the advocacy training from the advocacy teamwork, from Cathy’s leadership and from others who attended the workshop!) PLEASE BRING YOUR BLUE NOTEBOOKS from the November Workshop.

ALSO: Please write and bring with you to Thursday’s meeting (Jan 29th) a short, three-to-four sentence statement that tells YOUR PERSONAL STORY.

We will be dividing these PERSONAL STORIES into three main categories: 1) those who were helped by effective mental health services; 2) those for whom mental health care was inadequate, unavailable, &/or made worse by the current laws or limited resources, with severe personal costs and high costs to the community, such as situations ending in the criminal system, jail, or living on the street and so severe as to disrupt the chance of improvement; and 3) those whose family member’s situation ended in death by suicide, violence, or premature death from inadequate medical care.

In fact, each of our NAMI Austin legislative visit teams will be made up of three of us, with each category represented. This helps greatly in delivering the focused NAMI advocacy points to the legislators and their staffers that includes the range of diverse personal stories and outcomes.

We look forward to productive working sessions at each of these meetings. Please come to whichever ones meet your schedule, and as MANY as possible! Collectively, we have a great opportunity as a well-prepared and organized advocacy team to deliver these important issues to our lawmakers!

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact us by email (Cathy Weaver: catherineweaver@sbcglobal.net or Adrienne Kennedy-Puthoff: adrienne@puthoff.com), or call the NAMI Austin office at 420-9810.

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