The Interlake-Eastern Regional Health Authority's Regional Recovery Champions Committee's looking back at a positive first year.

"The group contains approximately 10 people," says Jill Hodgson-McConnell with the Recovery Champions Committee. "50 per cent of our membership is actually individuals with lived experience of mental health challenges, illnesses, and family or natural supports that may have been involved with the system of mental health supporting someone, or one of their family members. The other made up of an active membership of staff and community partners. We're a committee that comes together quarterly at this point and our objective is to provide a forum for community stake holders, individuals with lived experience, and family members natural supports to come together with the region and collaboratively plan, recommend, coordinate and evaluate some of the programs and actions taking place within our current mental health program here in our region."

Hodgson-McConnell feels they've been fairly successful over the past year.

"We've really come together as a committee by putting together some self-assessment days which included looking and collaborating with team members and staff from all the mental health and crisis services programs, and with the people with lived experience and the committee members, and we really looked at what is working for recovery in our mental health and crisis services and what are some of the areas that we could be doing better at. From there we collated all that info and suggestions and we put together a pretty comprehensive work plan to support our region in shifting how we do business, and how we look at how we provide services for folks that are seeking services for mental health."

The first year helped set things into motion and their belief is they need a huge shift in how they work within mental health and crisis services.

"The only way to do that is to really involve people with lived experience, and their natural supports or family members, and that's what we're doing. So setting us up for year two we plan to really continue to demonstrate the value of the committee and to try to be as involved in the transformation of our system as we can. That will look differently for different programs about what is going on for each of those programs but we definitely are considered a value in providing some feedback, suggestions, and really looking at things from the lense of an individual who has experienced, or been involved, with the mental health system."

She adds the response has been fantastic and they're always looking at how we can enhance and shift the services that are offered and the only way to do that is to really include the value of individuals with lived experience and their family and natural supports within the process.