Hi—I’m Tim!
I’ve been with Pathways Vermont for five years, and I have served in a few different roles throughout that time. I joined the Vermont Support Line team on a per diem basis in September 2018, and accepted a full-time role the following June. I joined the Admin team as a Program Assistant in October 2019 and began providing operational support for three of Pathways’ community mental health initiatives: Soteria House; the Pathways Community Center; and the Vermont Support Line. The role has grown since then, and I recently became a Program Coordinator.
Since I service a wide range of needs across multiple programs, my task lists can look wildly different from one week to the next. On average, 75% of my time goes towards monitoring our data collection efforts, drafting periodic reports on service outcomes for each program, and assisting teams with all the detail-driven compliance stuff like expense tracking, annual inspections, and maintaining archival records. I spend the remaining time supporting our Burlington-area locations with troubleshooting property issues, managing repair/renovation projects, and facilitating solutions to any obstacle our program staff encounter.
What inspires me about Pathways is the value we place on the lived experience of individuals, and the acknowledgement and active support for diverse roads to wellness. It seems to me this is the simplest, most obvious, and possibly the most effective counter-offering to the current system of care in our society. I hold no illusions about the work required to disrupt traditional models of service… but I witness the people who are Pathways show up to do that work every day, and I feel motivated by this.
My time with Pathways places all my previous work experiences in sharp relief; the tenets of Intentional Peer Support inform our approach with a focus on mutuality and co-creation which extends to community members and colleagues alike. The more work I put in for Pathways, the more I want to put in, energized knowing that we’re supporting the development of Vermont’s mental health peer workforce and leading the expansion of person-centered mental health services into all regions of Vermont.
