-: My name is Ellie Skelton.
I work at Touchstone Mental Health.
I'm their CEO, or executive director.
Touchstone Mental Health
inspires hope, healing, and well-being,
and what that means is
we work with adults and their families
with serious mental illness,
and we provide array of services
to help 'em stay out of the hospital,
reach their goals, find housing, keep housing,
find employment, a whole variety of goals.
So I'm always looking for additional resources, grants,
corporations, individuals to partner with us,
and then I also work with the people receiving our services.
They give us feedback about what works in the community,
what doesn't work.
And our staff, board members, and volunteers,
we identify what are the greatest needs in our community,
and then I get to go out and help find those resources
and partners to help fill that gap.
Well, every week is different,
but often I'll have meetings in the community,
I might be at the Minnesota State legislation
looking at the Capitol,
looking at what bills are gonna affect mental health,
are they gonna help or hurt,
work with our partners such as NAMI Minnesota
around issues of crisis or stabilization.
I have meetings with volunteers, the Board of Directors.
Those typically happen at my workplace.
Those are usually early morning or late in the day
'cause I work with busy corporate professionals often,
and so we kind of fit our schedule around their schedule.
Then we have staff meetings during the day.
We try and do some training for all staff.
So a lot of times I'm in the office,
but a lot of times I'm running around the community.
So every week could be different,
but there's typically at least 50% of my time
in the office working on things around funding, process,
organizational work that we need to do,
and about 50% kind of community-based,
working with people in the community
kind of making connections
and kind of moving us all forward.