Wildflower Roots was founded in October, 2025, but their story began more than 20 years prior in 2005.
Late in 2005, based on many years of advocacy on the part of many different psychiatric survivors and members of other intersecting movements, the seeds of a peer-run organization were planted. It started with one person posting flyers and trying to bring together people with psychiatric histories across the region to vision what a funded peer-run organization might look like.
By 2006, one person became over 30 when the one founded and coordinated an advisory board that began meeting regularly to take on that task. By the end of year, they had also interviewed and selected a fiscal sponsor from among four candidates. That fiscal sponsor agreed to support them to maintain their autonomy – including becoming an independent non-profit in the future if they so decided – while also handling background tasks like payroll and audits. By early 2007, the original founder had written and submitted a grant proposal driven by the voice of the board and together they became co-founders of the organization about which they’d been dreaming. Funding became official in May, 2007, also formalizing their relationship with the fiscal sponsor.
The organization grew rapidly from there. By 2025, they were more than 11 times their original size both in budget and number of employees, with the original founder serving as Director all along the way. They operated community centers and peer respites. They facilitated on-line and in person groups. They developed and offered trainings locally, nationally and beyond. And more!
However, as they grew, they became distracted by all the things they were trying to do and forgot something critical:
If you don’t prioritize your independence, it can be gone before you even knew it had begun to slip away.
At the start of 2025, for a variety of reasons, the organization began planning to leave the fiscal sponsor and become fully independent. However, when the fiscal sponsor found out about their plan before the organization was ready to present it to them, the fiscal sponsor claimed a conflict of interest and fired the Director.
This was a devastating blow that sent the organization into chaos and left everyone reeling. It wasn’t simply that there was a big change in leadership. Much more than that, they lost the very identity upon which they’d been founded. One moment they thought they had all the qualities of a truly peer-run organization and had the power to decide their own fate. The next, the fiscal sponsor that had once promised them autonomy and to support them if and when they wanted to become independent had decided they would use their own power to take all that away.
While efforts are still being made to support that organization to become independent, a handful of people – including that original founder – turned their attention to starting a new organization. And so Wildflower Roots was born!
Wildflower Roots represents a return to the roots of that original dream in 2005 of a fully independent peer-run organization, while blending that dream with all the real-life experience and wisdom gained over the last two decades. The organization also represents a restoration of justice and reclamation of identity that already should have been theirs.
This is especially important in the world of psychiatric survivors where co-optation is rampant, people are frequently afraid to fight back due to their dependence on the income controlled by those they’d be fighting, funders routinely take a ‘hands off’ approach regardless of claims of wanting to support peer-to-peer values, and peer-run groups are frequently in a position to have to trust agencies with significantly more power than them overall.
Now that Wildflower Roots has been born, it has committed to operating within an explicitly anti-force, anti-oppressive framework to raise up voice, choice, harm reduction and the wisdom gained through survival while striving to dismantle systems and build the knowledge sharing opportunities and supports the co-founders wish were available in their own most challenging times.
And while creating community by and for people with psychiatric and other overlapping histories will always be at the heart of what Wildflower Roots does, the organization will also focus on supports and learning opportunities for family and friends, peer supporters, clinical providers, first responders and more.
We are excited to see what the next 20 years may bring!