-: The thing that I enjoy is that
I feel like there is purpose in the work that I do,
I find meaning in it.
I'm helping to try and fix the mental health system
in Minnesota, which is very broken and
has lots of places where people can
fall through the cracks and not get help.
I like working on fighting stigma,
helping people have conversations about mental health,
mental health affects us all.
We all have behavioral health conditions,
some people will never have a serious mental health issue
but a lot of people experience it episodically
with a loss or injury in their life,
and just kind of normalizing that conversation
about, "What is mental health?",
"How do we have good mental health?",
and "How do we cope with
whatever types of mental health symptoms we may have?".
I would say I have two challenges.
Staff turnover,
keeping staff with us kind of on the long haul,
thirty percent of our staff have been hired within
the last year, and in an
organization with two hundred employees,
that's about seventy people that are brand new.
All of that training you need to do.
It's challenging because it's tough work,
it's not high pay,
and so we try to provide flexibility,
have work/life balance,
provide tools to prevent compassion fatigue.
Our second challenge is fundraising.
As our costs rise,
we just went ahead and made sure that
all of our employees were making a minimum
of fifteen dollars an hour to
meet the Minneapolis minimum wage
and we did that years ahead of schedule,
but we didn't get any additional reimbursement
from our funders to do that.
So anytime we have increased costs,
our margins really shrink and so we have to fundraise,
look for additional grant dollars,
and it's like a treadmill.
You're always looking for more money to fund the mission.