About Wellness Wordworks: Offering compelling spoken word poetry and motivational speaking to revolutionize mental health outcomes so people recover from lifelong diagnoses. Recruiting and nurturing volunteers for innovative programs that crowd-source community approaches to wellness so people can use connections with friends and their own personal strengths to overcome adversity.
About Corinna West:
- A Certified Peer Specialist who uses her recovery experience and her Master’s Degree in Pharmaceutical Chemistry to advocate for consumer directed mental health systems on a national level and in her home states of Kansas and Missouri.
- She uses her knowledge of overcoming 12 different mental health diagnoses to create social change through a combination of peer support, artistic performances, instigation at meetings, program development, and consumer controlled research.
- Member of the 1996 Olympic Judo Team, a 3 time national champion and silver medalist at the Pan American Games, she coached Judo for six years and introduced over 300 young athletes to the sport.
- Avid (or rabid) transportational bicyclist with more miles on her bicycle than her car for the last four years. She regularly rides on cross-state bicycle journeys for work conferences, art collection, and mobile advocacy.
- Creator of “Poetry for Personal Power,” a federally funded effort to use art and technology to help young adults access their friendships and personal strengths to overcome challenges in their lives.
“….I believed in the work ethic.
I believed anything was possible with enough persistence.
Anything that got in my way, I just overcame the resistance.
I chose mere subsistence, and I went the distance.
Everything else that happens for the next 12 years: recovery from mental illness, earning a masters degree, being homeless, married and divorced, four career changes, making a lot of friends…
Everything is impacted by my commitment to my dreams.
Because I can.
And What makes you think I play the piano with my fingers?”-Corinna West “Because I Can” The Olympic Poem
About this site: This website is a blog, a catalog of advocacy efforts, descriptions of programs created, and links to artistic performances available. This is an ongoing storytelling repository about overcoming adversity by building a brand new life filled with adventure, fun, miracles, friends, joy, and accomplishment. This is a central connection point for Facebook, Twitter, You-Tube, Flickr, and other social networking sites sharing respectful, revealing, revved up, responsible work to revolutionize the mental health system. We need to radically shift our funding to new approaches that move beyond the status quo and actually cure people of their difficulties.
Testemonials:
- Project Space Gallery: Most motivating: “The sense that individual actions make a difference.” Suprising: “How transformed I feel.” “The passion of the presenter.” “Very inspiring and hopefully delivered.” One action: “Be positive: use my struggles as fuel to be strong.” “Work on fighting harder for what I believe.”
- Liberty Arts Squared: One action: “Continue going for my dreams I have devoted my life to pursuing.” “Be more outspoken – like you!” Most motivating: “Charity begins in your own backyard.” “Hearing your personal story of Judo at the Olympics – I like your mantra.” Most useful – “Freedom and riding a bike.” Most surprising: “You are comfortable, you are tough.”
- Swope Behavioral Health Center: “Loved the poems!” “I liked the dream building and the interaction on ‘dream building’ and ‘sticking through adversity.” Most useful – don’t give up.”
- Elizabeth Layton Center: “I plan to keep working.” “I plan to exercise more.” “I plan to contact the government and president about mental health.” “The activity was the best part.”
- Alternatives 2008 (a national conference in Buffalo, NY): “The most engaging workshop I attended at the whole conference.” “Statistics most helpful – the speaker was very well informed.” “I liked the ideas about how improving life for a group improves the whole society.”
- North Cross United Methodist Church: “The poetry was a unique way to portray the message.” “The message was really conveyed in an exciting format. This needs to reach a wider audience.”
