Dear friends:

Freedom Center is celebrating our seventh year as Northampton's peer-run mental health alternative. Everything we do is volunteer-run and on a shoestring budget. We need you to participate! Your donation will be one of the most cost-effective ways to make a difference this holiday season.

Founded and led by people diagnosed with severe mental illnesses like bipolar and schizophrenia. Freedom Center offers support groups, writing workshops, yoga classes, an acupuncture clinic, human rights campaigns, advocacy help, a radio show, and public education. We are pro-choice, and support whatever treatment decisions members find works best for them: many of us take medications, many don't. Our grassroots community helps people avoid hospitals, make it through suicidal feelings, overcome isolation, find supportive therapists, navigate public services, and learn about holistic alternatives to medications.

We're changing lives and reaching hundreds of people every year with our vision of hope, mutual aid, and compassion. You can find out more at www.freedom-center.org.

Freedom Center is the most cost-effective health program in Northampton. We have a unique idea: listen to what people want, and base a program around us providing it for ourselves. Other local agencies and services spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on care that sometimes only makes problems worse. We offer meaningful support that comes directly from people who have been through mental health crisis speaking up about what we need. We're weaving a community of caring and gathering strong voices for change.

We've gotten tremendous recognition for our role in the community. In a publisher's Editorial, the Daily Hampshire Gazette congratulated us for standing up to pharmaceutical companies. Northampton Mayor Claire Higgins said "Freedom Center is a valuable option for many of our residents. It is a welcome addition to services available to citizens of our city." Forbes magazine spotlighted our forward-thinking and economical holistic approach to mental health with a page on their website, Healing Voices. http://tinyurl.com/Forbeshealingvoices. The federal National Council On Disability recently recognized Freedom Center as a national model of peer support. Around the world people are looking to Northampton for the innovative and visionary project we've created here.

If you've ever felt helped by Freedom Center's activism and services, if you know people who have turned to us when they were in need, if you are ready for a transformation in our mental health system, and if you want to help empower some of the most mistreated people in history--people labeled with mental illness, we are appealing to you now.

Please give generously to Freedom Center. Even a small donation makes a difference, and if you can afford more, your money makes a huge impact. All donations are tax-deductible (our tax id is CHOICES/75-3149780), and we have an easy web-based donation form on our site www.freedom-center.org.

Thanks and Happy Holidays,

Freedom Center