This List has been created by Bipolar Dream for the purpose of educating volunteer managers and service learning educators about mental illness. We believe that mental illness is not per se a reason for giving up on quality of life, even tough it can be harder to obtain. We also advocate the use of mental illness as a resource.

By raising awareness of mental disorders and how they impact on people, we hope to stimulate individual understanding and comprehension, far beyond legal inclusion and equality requirements, in compliance with IAVE's Universal Declaration on Volunteering:
http://www.iave.org/resources_udecl.cfm

Because of the quality of life any person with mental illness is entitled to, and because of the professionalization of this field, we advocate "A world where every volunteer is effectively led to change lives and communities" (AVA's mission statement), encouraging the whole volunteer management to strive for excellence also in dealing with volunteers with mental illness.

Finally, we strive to use volunteer management as a psychiatric rehabilitative tool, since many volunteers with mental illness reported it to be beneficial.

For all these reasons, this is a community of practice for persons in volunteer management that have experience with, are implementing programs about or are just curious on how to deal with volunteers with mental illness in a professional, informed, unbiased way. We share ideas, policies, practices and pragmatic implementations of our works.