The story below is from our January/February 2019 issue. For the full issue Subscribe today, view our FREE interactive digital edition or download our FREE iOS app!
Photo By Bohemian Robot Photography
Mental Health America’s new executive director has big plans for the ‘tiny but mighty’ nonprofit.
Annie Harvey stepped to the lectern for Mental Health America of Roanoke Valley’s inaugural fall fundraising luncheon.
“I’d like to tell you a little bit more about our programs,” she opened to her audience of 150 influential guests dining on quinoa and chocolate truffles.
“Stop. Stop. Stop.” A voice interrupted her from … perhaps outside in the hallway?
“Not now. Eyes down. Eyes down.”
Diners peered around the Patrick Henry Hotel Ballroom, confused, a little panicked.
Harvey had set down her microphone, her voice replaced by several others that were just not making sense.
Two to three tense moments later, Harvey’s address continued: “And that’s a little about what we’ve been doing for the last several months.”
Harvey had just given everyone in the room temporary schizophrenia.
Because she could think of no better way to do her job: raising awareness of mental illness.
“I hope that you were frustrated,” she explained her exercise. “I hope it made you angry and you wanted to walk out.
“Imagine if you felt like that all day, every day.”
Harvey was hired as executive director of MHA-RV in May 2018, after years at well-known nonprofits like Planned Parenthood and The American Red Cross. In that time, she’s made some bold moves (partnering with a doctoral candidate to assess the effectiveness of one of MHA-RV’s most popular programs), executed some big changes (expanding and retooling services to children touched by domestic violence) – and ruffled a few feathers.
Her goal: Do whatever it takes to make MHA-RV’s programs as effective and far-reaching as possible.
“Mental Health America is very well-known within the mental health community,” Harvey explains from her downtown office, sunlight streaming across the common room’s work table. “It is not well known outside that realm. We must change that.”
Here’s what Mental Health America of Roanoke Valley does:
- Provide free mental health assessments, treatments and medications for uninsured populations.
- Offer a weekly after-school program and one-week summer camp, in three age levels, to school-age children who have been impacted by domestic violence.
- Train law enforcement, first responders and clergy members in crisis intervention training techniques.
- Offer Mental Health First Aid, a program that teaches anyone to recognize signs of mental illness and substance abuse, modeled after CPR training.
All that with two full-time employees, two part-time employees and about two dozen volunteers.
“I will say we are the little nonprofit that could,” Harvey says. “We are tiny but mighty.”
To Harvey, the first step in MHA-RV’s new journey must be to increase its bottom line.
“I have so many ideas and so many wants. In order to fulfill them and to do justice by the programs, we have to get the funding in place.”
After that, expect Mental Health America Roanoke Valley’s impact to only grow. Harvey plans to do whatever it takes to make it so.
“There is such a critical need for this right now,” she says. “This is so important, so vital for our community.”
… for the rest of this story and more from our January/February 2019 issue, Subscribe today, view our FREE interactive digital edition or download our FREE iOS app!
