The Transformation Center
A statewide training, peer support, policy and best practice center operated by and for
people seeking mental health, substance use and trauma recovery.
Our Vision
We live in communities where people, individually and together, experience well-being, and help each other with mutual respect and compassion, to overcome the challenges we all face.
Our Mission
As people in all stages of recovering our mental health, wellness and freedom from addictions
– We promote the growth and voices of people with lived experience, individually, in communities and in organizations.
– We facilitate these diverse voices to impact and transform policy and practice.
Our Values
Self-Determination: We support the right of every person to choose their own recovery path without force.
Being part of the solution: We encourage every person to effect change & growth, to educate & help both self and others.
Independence: We celebrate the process of growth to self-sufficiency & support the right of each person to strive for it.
Mutuality: We build connection, giving & receiving help with self-respect & shared responsibility.
Social Justice: We are stewards of our environment through solidarity, equality and compassion.
The Transformation Center’s role is to “water the roots” of the movement and to join efforts with all who forward the goal of compassionate communities that value people. Our source of expertise is innovation driven by those who are impacted by suffering and discrimination.
Our logo is inspired by the widely known allegory on collaboration “Lessons from the Geese”. These lessons of the wild inspire a world where people are as wise as geese, where leadership is shared, and where we all stay focused on a shared vision and mission with “eyes on the prize.”
Wild Geese by Mary Oliver
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes, over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
The world offers itself to your imagination,
Calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting, over and over,
announcing your place in the family of things.
In 2004, responding to decades of grassroots advocacy for social change , the Massachusetts Department of Mental Health received Medicaid funding to support the beginnings of a statewide, peer-operated “Recovery Center for Excellence.” This is now called The Transformation Center. On May 19, 2008. The Transformation Center became a non-profit, 501 (c)3 tax exempt organization in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.