The New England MHTTC’s area of focus is the resilience and recovery of persons (and their loved ones) at risk for, living with or recovering from mental health challenges. During the reporting period, we continued to support and enhance the region’s capacity to provide equity-focused, recovery-oriented care across several dimensions. Our training and technical assistance (T/TA) explicitly aim to help promote recovery-oriented behavioral health systems of care and to move these systems beyond an acute care model to better meet the needs of persons with prolonged mental illness or substance use disorders (Davidson et al., 2021). A central aspect of recovery-oriented systems of care is the inclusion of people with lived experience at all levels of partnership–from service users, families, and direct peer support service providers to clinicians, managers, and administrators. Our T/TA aims to honor and promote those with lived experience in all our activities.

The content and process of our work is grounded in our Guiding Principles on Resilience and Recovery. Consistent with these principles, we take an equity-minded approach to recovery-oriented care which recognizes that even the most progressive treatment systems exist within a social context where people of color and other historically marginalized groups often experience—both individually and collectively—an additional layer of trauma that has devastating consequences on their health and well-being. We are committed to proactively advancing social justice and racial equity as an essential component of recovery-oriented systems transformation across the New England region.