To Ms. Kim Alexander,
You came in, a new face, and I have given you a grace period to figure out how to handle this mess, the grace period just ended, and we have now started to communicate in public – escalation step 1!

You can stonewall me, and listen to the idiotic lawyers – that is how we got into this mess to begin with; clinical skills developed in 1980, and lawyers having much too much influence. There is nothing refined about me – I simply want change at The Guidance Center Flagstaff. The lawyers and their tired old stonewalling play books escalate the stand-off. This isn’t about legal game play Ms. Alexander, this is exclusively about making The Guidance Center the best it can be. In the last 16 months the lawyers have run the show, and look at where you are at now!

My daydream for The Guidance Center is a clinic whose treatment and approach to clientele is entirely modern. It would be a place where clinicians are proud to work, where interns fight to go, and it would be a place where people out in the community and on the streets say “you should go there, they really help”; a place where coercive and dishonest attempts to get clients are utterly unnecessary, and abhorrent to all. I don’t think any of that has ever been true for TGC; but, we all know right now is bad.

SARP is closed – whether due to staffing shortages or because ADHS is closing it, or both – I don’t know. TGC appears to have not hired any licensed clinicians for months; it’s next to impossible to get a therapist there, and you guys are running a questionable and dangerous pipeline from the shelter into PAC and chairs. The clinic is crumpling under ridiculous executive salaries, old fashioned lawyering and absolutely zero genuine investment into its programming.

In my imagination TGC would be a place that COULD run research on how to best assist the most compromised in our community, because it is so well run that there is zero doubt as to how the most vulnerable would be treated. Right now, The Guidance Center Flagstaff is NOT such a place. TGC’s history with me and others make it a place where their involvement at the Shelter is incredibly dangerous!

I don’t envy you the work ahead of you – but let me be clear, I can be an ally if you want the same as I do; a modern Flagstaff mental health clinic that genuinely serves its community. It is that simple really. I am inserting myself because I was harmed there, and given the magnitude of that harm, you should welcome me as a way to prevent it happening again. There is a lot of negotiating we can do so that my peer support voice remains strong in the rebuild of TGC that I suspect you have been called in to spearhead – and yes, I said negotiating; I learned to negotiate in Marrakech, I am good at it, and I know it means me giving up on things as well.

But let me be perfectly clear: my negotiation has a hard boundary line. I am not here to settle for empty administrative policies or a sanitized “lawyered” script. To the extent that I see TGC making verifiable, structural progress on the floor—THAT is what I want. This isn’t about winning, it is about making TGC an exceptional clinic. I know the unhoused community because I am part of it, I know what it’s like to be homeless, I know what it is like to live with mental illness, with an SMI designation and SSDI based on mental illness; as a paraprofessional of 30 years I know where the weaknesses are internally, and I can credibly speak to what needs changing. No matter what current leadership has said about me, I have so much hard-won, real world experience within this field that not taking advantage of it is negligent; not to mention unintelligent, arrogant and uneducated in trauma-informed care protocols. In the name of everything sacred, stop trying to silence me and start to use me. I mean that – start to use me, please.

For us to engage, you need to tell both lawyers and the old guard of exploitative leadership to be quiet and sit down. They screwed this up, now let’s do it right. I don’t envy you what you have taken on; and right now I (still) treat you as a potential for improvement. That said, the grace period just ended – what are you here to do, Ms. Alexander? What does TGC want to be? What can TGC become? What would you like TGC to be? Are we aligned in a dream for something real? If yes, genuine, encouraged and honest peer support involvement is a necessity and you can just as well start with me!

Ms. Alexander, the corporate lawyers have spent the last 16 months telling TGC administration that I will eventually get tired and give up. Look at their results. It is true that carrying this survivor advocacy campaign single-handedly is exhausting, but I am not stopping—not now, and not in another 12 or 24 months. I will continue until real change happens, no matter the means. Next up – I believe it is about time for me to go look for the 2024/2025 Form 990, my documents dump from NAU is set with a deadline of 9/22, if I don’t have it by then, I escalate. I will simply continue what I am doing until I get the results I want. Breaking down TGC is incidental to me – I want psychiatric accountability and I don’t care how that change comes about.