We practice radical inclusivity. We are dedicated to serving all people who call Bayfield and Ignacio home, and who currently do not have equitable access to care. Our rural area lacks equitable access to mental healthcare and other critical services for many reasons. Some of the main reasons are:

1. Healthcare organizations struggle to make money providing excellent care in rural areas, and rural hospitals and clinics not considered profitable enough are being closed across the U.S., creating a crisis where many people go without healthcare and die earlier, sometimes without getting care. (Coughlin et. al., 2019) (Gizaw, 2022) (RHIhub, 2022);

2. Centuries of systemic discrimination and marginalization of Native American people and people of color create barriers and harm for the whole  community, and the harm is most acute for Native American’s and people of color (Findling, et. al. 2019) (Huber, 2020) (NPR 2020);

3. Discrimination and exclusion breed more discrimination and exclusion, and currently many people in our community cannot access care. People who cannot access care are often people with few rights, like children, or people who traditionally are marginalized and discriminated against, like people who identify as gay, people who have challenges from drug use, people who are poor, the elderly, people who are pregnant, and people who are disabled or who have serious illnesses (GAO, 2023)  (OSH, 2023) .

We’re working to address these challenges through  three interdependent program areas. 

Our three-part strategy is includes, 1. Health, Wellness, And Counseling Programs; 2. Programs To Promote And Preserve Community; 3. Education And Cultural Activities. 

1. Health, Wellness And Counseling Programs: 

Celebrate Empower’s Health, Wellness and Counseling Programs increase access to high quality, culturally appropriate, empowering mental health and wellness services. The goal of our strengths based and trauma informed care is not only to decrease distress and protect against suicide, loneliness, and substance use, but to greatly increase well being and connection.

2. Programs To Promote And Preserve Community/Community Connection programs: 

Celebrate Empower creates opportunities to experience authentic, nourishing connections with each other and ourselves, through spaces and events where community happens. Our Community Connection programs foster communication, build bridges between groups and individuals, and are tailor made to be inclusive and meet diverse needs. They’re also a ton of fun, and put the Celebrate in Celebrate Empower.  

Our Community Connection programs are still serious business. People in the U.S. have fewer friends today than ever before, and communities are under threat. The harmful effects of exclusion and isolation include loneliness, hopelessness, shame, stress, depression, anger, violence, substance misuse, decreased life expectancy, and deaths from despair and suicide. While the positive effects of connection are increased protective factors, well being, a sense of belonging, and feelings of pleasure. 

3. Education and Cultural Activity Programs: 

Celebrate Empower’s Education and Cultural Activity Programs create opportunities to harness the power of learning, to know thyself, and to accelerate personal growth. We use digital, visual, spoken and written communication, as well as curated experiences, and special events to raise awareness, to teach and to train, to celebrate and share culture, and to create opportunities for self reflection and personal growth. 

These programs seek to empower individuals and their communities to identify problems and opportunities for themselves. We support individuals, as they lead, and together we work toward their health and wellness goals, in their time, and in their own way. Celebrate Empower’s Education and Cultural Activity Programs embody our commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion. They provide a vehicle for bridging the gulf created by biases and discrimination, developing empathy, self knowledge, acceptance, and deciding how to best treat others and the environment. 

These three strategic program areas fill critical service gaps in our local community.

Gaps that decrease well being and community resilience. Together our interrelated programs create synergy, and multiply positive impacts while removing barriers endemic to weakened and fractured communities. 

Identified local challenges our programs address include:

Several challenges have been identified in our community, including lower than average life expectancy and high rates of deaths from preventable illnesses due to inadequate access to medical care, as well as higher than average rates of loneliness, isolation, anxiety, depression, substance misuse, deaths from dispair and suicide, and discrimination (American Heart Association, 2023) (Mercy Hospital, 2022). Celebrate Empower’s programs are specifically created to address these critical challenges.

What’s happening now

Due to the severity, urgency, and types of local mental health needs, our first program to launch is a health, wellness, and counseling program, in the form of accessible, in-person counseling and coaching in Bayfield and Ignacio, using a unique model of sustainable, high quality mental health care funded by philanthropy.  The IRS has recently awarded Celebrate Empower tax exempt status, and donations made to the organization are now tax exempt.

Get involved

Your support can help us establish our first program, and sustain our long term mission to improve health and well being through counseling, education, culture, and community connection programs. Contact Celebrate Empower at contact@empower.ngo

Learn more about the Celebrate Empower difference

Celebrate Empower’s Strategic Pillars 

Reimagining the relationship between a counselor and their community

Why a nonprofit? 

Celebrate Empower works to reinvent business models for mental health and wellness and is guided by our four strategic pillars. One of our four pillars is mental health care funded by philanthropy. The other three are sustainability for mental healthcare workers, collaboration, and business transformation.

Four Strategic Pillars: 

1. Mental health care funded by philanthropy. 

Major philanthropy organizations and government agencies are investing big in mental health and well being programs in order to address multiple simultaneous mental health related public health crises. There is strong evidence that philanthropy can be one pillar for sustainably funding local mental healthcare and wellness services. Sustainability is critical for creating and maintaining access to high quality, culturally informed care, especially in underserved communities that traditionally lack access due to funding challenges. Also, there is strong public support locally and nationally for structuring healthcare as not-for-profit, and less support for healthcare providers seeking to profit from peoples sicknesses and need for care (LWV, 2022) (Work Group for Improved Health Care, 2022). 

2. Sustainability for mental healthcare workers. 

Celebrate Empower strives to ensure our programs, services, and actions invite the broadest possible participation. We are committed to helping through collaboration, to create, support, and sustain an inclusive community of local mental health care works representative of the people living here. We are strategically investing in our local communities' future by supporting diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, which include fair compensation and ethical, sustainable work practices. Sustaining local providers has broad public support locally and nationally, and is an evidence based practice linked to better health outcomes (Local First, 2019) (LWV, 2022). 

Many mental healthcare organizations create profit by passing along most of their costs to their employees and clients. How much do they pass on? An organization saves 30% on the dollar when they classify an employee as a contract or gig worker. And that’s just employee wages and benefits. Add savings from not providing a workspace or work equipment, and the amount balloons. Since gig workers report earning less than employees for doing the same work, another cost savings to an employer, the total amount saved can be substantial. But these costs don’t just disappear. They are paid by the counselor, who now must pay self employment and income taxes, often 30% of what they earn, from a lower than typical wage for the same work. They must purchase their own equipment and rent their own workspace, or do without. Whatever costs the counselor can’t afford, they pass on to clients, often in the form of decreased quality of care due to stress, fatigue, and life problems created by poverty wages; a less than ideal meeting space due to cost restrictions, and few to no therapy and counseling supplies. Therapy worksheets and boxes of tissues aren’t going to pay for themselves.  Organizations with working conditions like these have high turnover, and clients pay this cost with their own health and well being, when they must be assigned a new counselor every few months (Walter & Bahn, 2017).

When organizations hurt employees and clients to increase their bottom line, great harm is done. To protect clients, our community, and to attract and retain a diverse staff, Celebrate Empower is committed to not passing on the cost of doing business to our employees and clients and not using discriminatory practices to justifying low wages, not providing work space or work equipment, demanding excessive hours and unsafe client ratios, requiring employees to work outside of scheduled time and setting irregular work schedules, invading employee and client privacy, using employee property, and disempowering staff and discouraging unions (Toh, 2022). 

3. Community Collaboration.

Celebrate Empower collaborates through work with industry and community partners to further our mission and support sustainable mental health and wellbeing services and programs. Our work is guided by the voices of the people in the communities we serve. Carrying out our mission relies on the support of individuals, the community, businesses, organizations and agencies who believe in our work.

4. Business transformation.

To Celebrate Empower, business transformation in the local mental healthcare industry can mean many things: innovations in counseling services; new approaches to organization management; new program and service development; and more. Part of Celebrate Empower’s mission is to innovate new revenue streams to develop sustainable business models for the important work of mental health and wellness services.

Our Values

Participatory Governance:

People involved in and touched by our organization deserve to be a part of the decisions that impact them.  Power and decision making structures that involve people with direct experience of issues are not only more supportive of personal sovereignty, but also more effective in achieving goals.

Radical Inclusivity and Nondiscriminatory Policy:

We are creating a nondiscriminatory space where all people can belong, regardless of nationality, religion, race, class, gender, sexual orientation, ability, or any other dimension of their experience.  We acknowledge that we live within and have been conditioned by a system that centers some dimensions of humanity at the expense of others. In order to create a radically inclusive space we must take proactive steps to elevate the people, identities, cultures, energies, and characteristics that our dominant system marginalizes. Celebrate Empower hires and partners with people regardless of their nationality, religion, race, class, gender, sexual orientation or ability. 

Power With, Not Power Over:

We are creating a space where all people can step fully into their power.  We support each other to exercise our power in ways that support the power, visions, and development of one another.  We interrogate and transform relationships where one person’s empowerment relies on the disempowerment, control, or coercion of another.

Accountable Solidarity:

Our work and our liberation is deeply bound together with many communities. We foster relationships and understandings that will allow us to do our work in a way that uplifts all people. We recognize that this requires taking proactive steps to ensure our activities do not unintentionally reproduce the oppression of the dominant system by excluding the needs of women, people of color, indigenous people, disabled people, or any other group that is often denied voice in the decisions that impact them.  We engage in the ongoing practice of solidarity, and remain open to feedback from all communities we touch. 

Management Principles

Celebrate Empower is managed through participatory processes designed and stewarded by those who work in the organization. These processes include input from external stakeholders when appropriate. The processes are expected to emerge over time in response to the activities of the organization. Workers are responsible for maintaining a self-management handbook that details the practices they are using to coordinate their activities. The Board monitors and supports workers self-direction. 

Strategy emerges from a worker-directed process that incorporates the input of community partners, impacted communities, and the board of directors. The board of directors helps the staff reflect on the efficacy of the process. 

The following four rules are general guidelines to inform the creation of participatory management structures. 

1. People with the most direct experience of issues have the most insight into what action is best.

2. People who are affected by decisions should have the power to influence those decisions.

3. Professional and technical expertise should be leveraged to support, not overpower, the voice and needs of those directly connected to the issue.

4. People and teams that are not directly connected to impacted communities can be useful to help coordinate collective action, support logistics, and hold long term concerns (like financial planning), but can also run the risk of mistakenly consolidating power and breeching principles one through three. 

Accountability Statement

There are three levels of accountability in the organization: Interpersonal, Intra-organizational, and Community.

Interpersonal: We foster a culture of direct and compassionate communication, personal growth, and acceptance.  We encourage and welcome loving feedback about the impacts of our behavior on the work and our community.

We encourage bi-annual self and peer review which gives us an opportunity to reflect on our own activities and get supportive reflections from each other.

Intra-Organizational: Decision-making bodies within the organization are accountable to one another. If a program makes a decision that might impact another program circle, they are required to get that other program’s consent.  If a program makes a decision that impacts the organization as a whole, they are required to get the consent of the broader organization.

Community: Every member of our organization is expected to actively build relationships with people outside our organization that are impacted by our work. Our strategy is to develop partnerships which include representatives from those communities.

Our history

Celebrate Empower was born from a tiny seed, and a lot of hope. A small group of care providers noticed a need. Many of their clients, patients, neighbors, and friends were experiencing so much suffering. They couldn’t access mental healthcare, even though they wanted to, they often felt hopeless, alone, and isolated but couldn’t find ways to connect, and many of them endured discrimination and were marginalized at work and in the community, which only made things worse. The care providers had to admit, sometimes they felt the same way. No matter how long and hard they worked, or how much they volunteered their time, things seemed to be getting worse, not better. Something had to change.

As they talked, they dreamed up Celebrate Empower. A place that instinctually honored the human dignity and worth in everyone, and  that met people where they were at with individualized support, regardless of their ability to pay. A place that empowered people to heal, connect, and to celebrate, as they became more and more their authentic selves. A place that would create lasting change and connected relationships that would help heal their community. 

“Wouldn’t that be great!” they thought. The more they talked, the less impossible it seemed. And Celebrate Empower was born. The organization was founded in Bayfield, Colorado, in 2023 as a 501 (c)(3) public charity, an organizations organized and operated exclusively for religious, charitable, scientific, testing for public safety, literary, educational, or other specified purposes and that meet certain other requirements are tax exempt under Internal Revenue Code Section 501(c)(3). We strives to improve health and well being through counseling, education, culture, and community connection programs.

Our Board of Directors 

President Rachel Shockley 

Secretary Alicia Spear 

Treasurer Angelina Rubio 

Director Misty Weiser

Giving

To make a tax deductible  contribution, bequest or gift, please contact us at contact@empower.ngo 

References:

American Heart Association. (2023, November). Health disparities among the many unique challenges for people in rural America. https://newsroom.heart.org/news/health-disparities-among-the-many-unique-challenges-for-people-in-rural-america

Coughlin, S. S., Clary, C., Johnson, J. A., Berman, A., Heboyan, V., Benevides, T., Moore, J., & George, V. (2019). Continuing Challenges in Rural Health in the United States. Journal of environment and health sciences, 5(2), 90–92.

Findling, M. G., Casey, L. S., Fryberg, S. A., Hafner, S., Blendon, R. J., Benson, J. M., Sayde, J. M., & Miller, C. (2019). Discrimination in the United States: Experiences of Native Americans. Health services research, 54 Suppl 2(Suppl 2), 1431–1441. https://doi.org/10.1111/1475-6773.13224

Gizaw, Z., Astale, T., & Kassie, G. M. (2022). What improves access to primary healthcare services in rural communities? A systematic review. BMC primary care, 23(1), 313. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12875-022-01919-0

GAO. (2023, May). Why health care is harder to access in rural America. U.S. Government Accountability Office. https://www.gao.gov/blog/why-health-care-harder-access-rural-america

Huber, K. H. (2020, July). How discrimination harms the economy and business. The University of Chicago Booth School of Business. https://www.chicagobooth.edu/review/how-discrimination-harms-economy-and-business

LWV. (2022, October). Healthcare in La Plata County: A SURVEY OF OPINIONS AND EXPERIENCES OF LA PLATA COUNTY RESIDENTS. League of Women Voters of La Plata County. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1zMFHIRA2wnStkjjsIKw_H5TwvIzXPvzB/view

Mercy Hospital. (2022). Mercy Hospital, COMMUNITY HEALTH IMPLEMENTATION STR ATEGY, ADOPTED NOVEMBER 2022. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1DMg9kyfJyEXo9lORzIPWMoaETDJzXcUa/view

NPR. (2020, July 1). What systemic racism means and the way it harms communities. NPR. https://www.npr.org/2020/07/01/885878564/what-systemic-racism-means-and-the-way-it-harms-communities

RHIhub. (2022, November). Healthcare access in rural communities. Rural Health Information Hub. https://www.ruralhealthinfo.org/topics/healthcare-access

Toh, A. (2022, August 11). US ‘Flexible Work’ bill would spell disaster for rights in gig economy: Workers Need More Protections, Not Less. Human Rights Watch. https://www.hrw.org/news/2022/08/11/us-flexible-work-bill-would-spell-disaster-rights-gig-economy

Walter, K., & Bahn, K. (2017, October 13). Raising Pay and Providing Benefits for Workers in a Disruptive Economy: State and Local Policies to Support Independent Contractors. Center for American Progress. https://www.americanprogress.org/article/raising-pay-providing-benefits-workers-disruptive-economy/

Work Group for Improved Health Care. (2022, June). Interim Report: Medical Provider Access Concerns and Plans for Improvement by Specialty. https://drive.google.com/file/d/12KxS5czs_4u8U6RmzYhjh-rJXhHDnUAF/view