The coalitions work locally to identify core issues, develop community solutions, and find funding to put those solutions into practice. This grew into Healthy Communities Massachusetts, a statewide network of neighborhood coalitions. Wolff spun that experience into Community Partners, a nonprofit technical assistance and training program affiliated with the University of Massachusetts Medical School. “That community piece of deinstitutionalization was missed in almost all communities,” he says. The effort there also included funding for community-based programs, which he believes made the difference. “What happened in Northampton was very successful because it wasn’t just looking at deinstitutionalization as a clinical issue,” he adds. “Eventually we had the police and the emergency service director talking on a weekly basis, case by case,” he says. With Wolff’s guidance, they began working together to help the former patients integrate into the community. But with deinstitutionalization a legal mandate, community members had little choice but to figure out how to deal with the situation. “In the beginning they were just name calling and kicking each other under the table,” Wolff recalls. ![]() In 1981, he was tapped to lead the deinstitutionalization task force there. So he jumped at the chance to run the education and prevention unit at a community mental health center in Northampton, Mass. From his early training in Rochester, he says, it had been impressed upon him that prevention was a critical piece of the mental health puzzle. “I think it’s just in my blood,” he says.Īfter receiving his PhD in clinical psychology from the University of Rochester, Wolff began working in the field of college mental health, doing a combination of therapy and community work. Whether it was his family’s Holocaust history or the liberal activist community he grew up in that led him to issues of social justice, he’s not quite sure. He grew up in Queens, N.Y., the son of Jewish immigrants who fled to the United States in 1938. McNeil Award for Innovation in Community Mental Health. Wolff is an APA fellow and recipient of its 1985 award for Distinguished Contributions to Practice in Community Psychology and its 1993 Henry V. “A lot of people will come to the table,” he says, “if you create a table.” Most of his projects have at least one thing in common, however: multiple players with individual agendas who don’t always see eye to eye - and that’s where Wolff comes in. He’s collaborated on issues as varied as violence prevention, rural transportation, substance abuse and oral health. “People began to listen and understand how to work together better, and I began to understand how to make those environments work,” he says.įor three decades, Wolff has built coalitions and worked to solve problems big and small. ![]() He formed a deinstitutionalization task force, and appointed Wolff to lead it. When the hearing devolved into a “name-calling brawl,” he says, he stepped in to use his psychology training to help restore calm. “It was overwhelming the community,” Wolff says. It was the early 1980s, and both a state hospital and the local VA hospital were being deinstitutionalized, turning patients out into the small town of 25,000. For Tom Wolff, PhD, it all started at a community hearing in Northampton, Mass.
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