Thank you for joining us for the Oregon Supported Employment Center for Excellence’s

2020
13th Annual Oregon
IPS Supported Employment &
Education Statewide Conference
Going Virtual!

 

Held on October 26-30, 2020

 

FEATURING

Dr. Patricia Deegan

Dr. Deegan is a disability-rights advocate, psychologist, and researcher who was diagnosed with schizophrenia at age 17. She is known as an advocate of the mental health recovery movement and is an international speaker and trainer in the field of mental health. Dr. Deegan created the CommonGround Program to support people’s recovery and help peers and providers re-ignite their passion for the work they’ve been called to do.

OSECE’s First Virtual Conference!

This year’s conference took place on October 27-30, 2020 via Zoom. We want to thank all of our amazing presenters and participants, who made this one the best conferences yet! Please use the links below to find the e-binder (which includes the agenda and presenter bios), and a survey to collect CEUs. Please submit this form to Allyson Morrison to receive CEUs or CRCs. To receive a packet with presentations and handouts from the conference contact Tammy Guest.

Presenters

Imadé Nibokun Borha, Depressed While Black

Imadé (ee-MAH-day) is a writer and mental health advocate who founded Depressed While Black. She is a suicide attempt survivor who lives with clinical depression and borderline personality disorder. Imadé first developed Depressed While Black as her 2015 Columbia University Non-Fiction Creative Writing MFA thesis. Depressed While Black has grown into an online community, an in-progress book, and a nonprofit that donates Black-affirming personal care items to mental hospital patients.

Dr. Alaí Reyes-Santos

Dr. Reyes-Santos is a professor of Ethnic Studies at University of Oregon, founder of the ceremonial space Ilé Estrella de los Mares, and an equity and inclusion consultant. She is the author of Our Caribbean Kin: Race and Nation in the Neoliberal Antilles (Rutgers University Press, 2015). Her manuscript-in-progress, Oceanic Whispers, Secrets She Never Told, intervenes in conversations about restorative justice and community healing through a Black Caribbean epistemological lens. Her ongoing research project with Dr. Ana-Maurine Lara, titled Decolonizing Knowledge: AfroIndigenous Caribbean Women Healers, will showcase healers and their ethnobotanical resources through an open-access digital archive.

Oscar Jiménez-Solomon, MPH

Oscar Jiménez-Solomon is a mental health researcher who has dedicated his career to improving the financial wellness of people with psychiatric conditions through research, program development, training and technical assistance, and policy advocacy. Mr. Jiménez-Solomon’s commitment to helping others overcome unemployment and poverty stems from his personal experience of economic exclusion and recovery. Oscar’s main research goals include to better understand how poverty and shame affect mental health; and ways in which peer support and consumer empowerment interventions can foster social connections, recovery, and wellness.

 

Dr. Peggy Swarbrick

Dr. Swarbrick has published and lectured around the county and internationally on employment, wellness, peer support, and recovery. Her work has focused on a strength-based 8-dimensional wellness model to promote recovery from mental health and substance use conditions. She is well known for collaborating with the peer community and family groups to identify and address social determinants that present barriers to recovery, such as homelessness, poverty and under/unemployment. Peggy has developed many peer support certification courses, a peer health navigator training and peer wellness coaching practice model. She has created health promotion initiatives and has created wellness self-care programs for caregiver’s families and youth. She has made significant contributions to the body of literature in occupational therapy, nursing and community behavioral health care practice.

Frank King, The Mental Health Comedian

Frank King, Suicide Prevention Speaker and Trainer was a writer for The Tonight Show for 20 years. Depression and suicide run in his family. He’s thought about killing himself more times than he can count. He’s fought a lifetime battle with Major Depressive Disorder and Chronic Suicidality, turning that long dark journey of the soul into five TEDx Talks and sharing his lifesaving insights on Mental Health Awareness with associations, corporations, and colleges. A Motivational Public Speaker who uses his life lessons to start the conversation giving people permission to give voice to their feelings and experiences surrounding depression and suicide. And doing it by coming out, as it were, and standing in his truth, and doing it with humor. He believes that where there is humor there is hope, where there is laughter there is life, nobody dies laughing. The right person, at the right time, with the right information, can save a life.

Larry Robbin

Larry has over 45 years of experience as a direct service provider, job developer, consultant, and trainer in the mental health employment field.  He has trained over 100,000 people across the country and presented more than 300 webinars.  His services are used by government agencies, nonprofits, social services, businesses, schools, and other entities.  Larry spends part of his time a private-sector consultant so he can help mental health employment programs become more effective in their work with employers.  On a personal note, Larry’s mother had bipolar disorder and he has family members that are consumers.