Transformative Mutual Aid Practices (T-MAPs) are an emerging set of community-developed tools that provide space for building a personal “map” of wellness strategies, resilience practices and collective resources.

T-MAPs offer the opportunity to connect with yourself and others in tangible ways that contribute to personal and community healing.

You can complete a personalized booklet (or “T-MAP”) by yourself or with a group. Your T-MAP becomes a guide for navigating challenging times, returning to what you care about, and communicating with the important people in your life. We’re developing different ways to create this document; once available, these tools can help you generate your T-MAP through an online questionnaire, through a curriculum that will help you create T-MAPs as a group, or through a downloadable pdf workbook that you can print and fill out.

T-MAPs are drawn from our collective wisdom, not clinical practice or “managed care.” These tools take into account our social, economic, and political context, and create space for thinking through how our histories and backgrounds shape who we are now. As our political climate becomes more heartless and unstable, we feel the need to weave our own safety nets. T-MAPs can be nourishing to everyone from grassroots social justice activists to woke health care practitioners and Peer Specialists working on the front lines of the mental health system.

Why make a T-MAP?

Writing down stories about our lives helps us understand who we are, how we got here, and how we relate to the world around us. Wellness strategies are things like eating enough food every day and talking to our support people, which help us stay on our path. Resilience practices are things that bring us a feeling of being whole and alive - spending time in nature, singing, hanging out with people we care about - which help us stay grounded. Resources can be things in our local community - like friendly gathering spaces and places where we can watch the stars at night - or our favorite media, like helpful books and podcasts, or national resources like The Icarus Project and The Hearing Voices Network. Articulating these things gives us a resource we can share with the people in our lives to guide our conversations and help us support each other through rough times.

Try making your own T-MAP! You can take a spin with our online tool here.