About COPE

Initiatives

Promoting Recovery

When life is shattered by a mental health disorder, people sometimes become disconnected from their dreams, hopes, roles, friends, family, status, employment, and possibly more. So what can COPE do to help?

COPE creates opportunities and hope for recovery. Recovery is not a cure. Recovery is a process in which each person, fueled by hope and building on their strengths and abilities, takes responsibility for their life, grows more resilient and well, and develops an identity apart from their disorder.

Recovery is not easy nor does it happen overnight but it does happen with wonderful results. People may always need to take medication, but as they grow and change, they will discover strength, joy, and new meaning in life. And there is every reason to be hopeful about recovery because all people with serious mental health disorders can recover if they have the right supports.

Following are steps to recovery and some techniques and ideas that COPE staff use to help people piece their lives back together:

• Grief: People need to be allowed to grieve their losses and to accept that they have a mental health disorder, but the process must not end there. Staff help people process their grief and move on.
• Hope: Hope is the number one predictor of recovery. Without hope that life can be better, there's no reason to try to do anything. It may be necessary for staff to be purveyors of hope by believing in people before they are able to believe in themselves.
• Education: Education increases hope and builds self esteem. Through education, staff empower individuals and dispel misinformation. By learning coping skills and how to stay well, COPE clients become more able to help themselves.
• Vision: To be truly motivating, hope has to be more than just an idea. People must have an actual image of how life could be. While results may be different from those envisioned, it is essential to have some sort of clear image if people are going to make difficult changes. Staff help people develop a positive vision of what they can be and then help them achieve it.
• Success: Often it takes some successful experiences for people to really believe they can be successful. Since "readiness" often occurs only in retrospect (after something has been done successfully), staff help by identifying and pointing out successes.
• Empowerment: To recover, people need a sense of their capability, their power. Their hope needs to be focused on things they can do rather than on what someone can do for them. The appeal of being taken care of can derail recovery as can being too frightened to take risks. COPE staff encourage people to take reasonable risks.
• Responsibility: People who recover realize that no one else can recover for them, that they have to take charge of their own recovery. Having dreams and goals ignites personal responsibility, but people are sometimes afraid to take responsibility. Staff can support their efforts to recover, but people cannot be "taken care of" or "protected" into recovery.
• Choice: People need to make choices between viable options. Making their own decisions, taking their own risks, and learning their own lessons are essential to recovery. Staff can promote personal growth by allowing people to make non-lethal mistakes while staff continues to believe in, educate, and encourage them.
• Meaningful Role: To recover, people must have some meaningful role apart from their mental health disorder. At first, a sense of belonging may only be possible with others who have a mental health disorder or with their supporters. Eventually, having a meaningful role will become possible in a variety of contexts.
  COPE provides comprehensive services and supports for people in recovery.

Promoting Cultural Competence

COPE is successful in improving the health and quality of life of individuals and our community in part because of our ever-increasing capacity for culturally appropriate collaboration and engagement with both individuals and the community. Recognizing, valuing, and promoting culture and diversity is integrated into virtually everything at COPE: How we relate to one another and to those we serve as well as to the community; how we provide programs and services; how we partner with groups and organizations in the community; how we solve problems and make decisions; how we improve our service quality and responsiveness; and how we recruit, train, and retain staff.

Promoting Customer Service

Customer service at COPE has created a positive and welcoming environment for COPE customers and the community. For COPE, everyone is a customer and outstanding customer service is as simple, yet challenging, as always putting the other person first. This means treating everyone with friendliness, care, respect, and integrity. Customer service training at COPE moves beyond a statement of abstract principles and describes the specific behaviors that underlie and reflect the principles. Friendliness, for example, can be seen through positive attitudes, warm smiles, eye contact, a pleasant tone of voice, or a request to offer assistance. COPE strives to bring the principles of customer service to life by focusing on actual behaviors.