Mental Wellness Community Group Library

Queens Mutual Aid has been working on a library of community groups focused on mental wellness, based on needs our community identified. We hope this list is helpful to people in many places, but we're especially looking for groups in Queens and the Bronx.

Use the button to the right to submit a community group to be included in the database. After you submit, we'll approve it before it's shown on the site.

Contact mutualaidqueens@makejusticenormal.org to help improve the library. If the area below looks blank, try refreshing or changing your browser. And if that doesn't work, please email us to troubleshoot.

Why

We didn’t start this because we had answers. We started because some of us are hurting and have learned some things from experiences inside and outside of systems. We have lived the stress and sadness that can come from trying to survive the weight of bills, discrimination, political dehumanization, and displacement. And we feel the weight of what is coming: the consequences of climate change that will haunt our future ancestors.

For some of us, the cultural stigma of looking for help is too hard to overcome. For others, the systems that offer care don’t speak our culture or language, aren’t affordable, or ask us to find time we don’t have. Some of us have found our way back to ourselves through art. It helps us name what we feel, remember joy, stay connected, and imagine something better.

So we come to this not as experts, but as neighbors with diverse creative practices trying to imagine mental wellness as something we do together — without jargon or insurance — and as part of our everyday life and spaces.

  • "Art saved me; it got me through my depression and self-loathing, back to a place of innocence."

    — Jeanette Winterson

  • "You read something which you thought only happened to you, and you discover that it happened 100 years ago to Dostoyevsky. This is a very great liberation for the suffering, struggling person, who always thinks that he is alone. This is why art is important. Art would not be important if life were not important, and life is important.”

    — James Baldwin, from “An interview with James Baldwin” (1961)

  • "Art is the one place we all turn to for solace."

    —Carrie Mae Weems

  • "The arts saved my life."

    — Michael K. Williams