[NYAPRS Enews] In Memory and Honor of Mimi Kravitz

[Matt Canuteson]

It is with great sorrow that we grieve the passing of Miriam 'Mimi'
Kravitz. Mimi was one of the great leaders of the consumer
movement...bright, brave, funny, charming, outrageous and a visionary
leader who founded one of the nation's first consumer run agencies that
helped people with psychiatric disabilities develop their own businesses
during a time when the standard was to discourage employment altogether.


Over the years, she endured many terrible and humbling personal
struggles with trauma and psychiatric disability. Through it all, she
fought passionately against forced treatment and dehumanizing
hope-deprived services and gave hope and humor to so many. 

Mimi was a bright prism of many colors...she was a lawyer, an author, an
organizer, an executive, a singer and dancer, a board member and an
endearingly warm and funny very human being. 

I will always remember the time she took the stage at the NYAPRS Annual
Conference a decade ago and led hundreds in an acapella version of a
song she had written for her friend and fellow leader in the movement,
Howie the Harp. 

She had many, many moments like that where she touched so many; we will
remember her warmly with love forever. 

Harvey Rosenthal

 

Steve Coe, executive director, Community Access: "I'm sad to report that
Mimi Kravitz, a long-time friend and a Community Access board
member...has died. Mimi was found in her apartment on Friday afternoon.
An autopsy is being conducted, so we do not know the cause of death at
this time.

...Mimi was intelligent, talented, and extremely creative--a true
artist. She sang and played several instruments and at one time had a
band she called Mimi and Escaped Mental Patients. On at least two
occasions, she sang and played the piano at Community Access galas. Mimi
was also a lawyer and often told stories about living in her Buick while
going to law school. Mimi was a close friend of Howie the Harp and
worked with Community Access in the early 1990's to sponsor two major
conferences featuring business and employment projects sponsored by
consumers. She also founded a nonprofit organization to promote consumer
entrepreneurship called Incube. The last time I saw Mimi was at a
cultivation event we held on December 2 to recruit donors and volunteers
for this year's gala. True to form, Mimi brought her guitar and by the
end of the evening had everyone singing along to one of her original
compositions."

 
Bob Bernstein, executive director, Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law:
"Many of us at Bazelon remember Mimi as savvy, wonderfully
outspoken..and insightful. I had the privilege of working with Mimi in
support of a program she founded that fostered independence by setting
consumers up in their own businesses.  Sometimes outlandish, Mimi was
also genuinely smart and caring.  This is a very sad loss." Mimi served
as a Bazelon trustee from 1996 to 2002.

 

Annette Campbell, NYC Peer Networking Group: "Many of you may have known
Mimi, a lovely and talented red-head with a dimpled smile. She was a
longtime friend and advocate from my days with Project US at the Post
Graduate Center. Mimi was a terrific singer who performed several times
in the 1990s at our Community Access ClubNet Cafe Open Mike Tuesday
Nights.  Mimi will be missed!" 

 

David Lehman, executive director, Venture House: "Miriam (Mimi) Kravitz
was a strong and resolute advocate for people with psychiatric
disabilities and helped many to realize the importance of work as a
means of living a fulfilling life. She was funny, intelligent and
challenging. She will be missed by her friends at Venture House."

 

NY Times: "Miriam Kravitz, a long-time friend and board member of
Community Access, passed away on January 16th at age 54.  Mimi was a
passionate advocate for people with psychiatric disabilities and founder
of a nonprofit organization, Incube, that promoted social ventures and
entrepreneurship by people diagnosed with mental illness.  Mimi was also
a bona fide Renaissance woman: she sang and wrote her own lyrics, played
several instruments, and was a lawyer.  Mimi's generous spirit and
creative energy will be missed by everyone who knew her.  A memorial
service will be held in the near future; please visit our web site for
news and updates: www.communityaccess.org
<http://www.communityaccess.org> ." 

 

Cards and letters can be sent to the family at the following address:

Dr. Sanford Kravitz

20 Cahuilla Hills Drive

Palm Springs, CA  92264

 

As of now, set aside February 20 (4-7 pm) for a possible NYC-based
Memorial Service for Mimi (we'll share details as we get them).

 

Here's two pieces she authored, one a link to a prescient paper on
consumer run business and the other a very touching account of her life
and work that she wrote for New York City Voices 

 

Consumer Run Businesses In The USA  1999

Author: Gerold Schwarz, Peter Stastny, Miriam Kravitz from INCube Inc. 

A 10 page paper covering a new approach to vocational rehab for people
with psychiatric disabilities. 

Download: 
http://resources.socialfirms.co.uk/files/resources/consumer_run_business
es_in_the_usa.pdf
<http://resources.socialfirms.co.uk/files/resources/consumer_run_busines
ses_in_the_usa.pdf> 

 

Legal Actions

Miriam Kravitz, Esq.

New York City Voices ("A Peer Journal for Mental Health Advocacy")
Fall 1998

http://www.nycvoices.org/article_46.php

 

I am deeply grateful for having the opportunity to speak to you all
about myself and INCube. I hope to be able to tell you a little about
not only what I've gone through but who I have become in my struggles to
not only be a survivor but a person who celebrates life. 


My job for the last ten years has been to grow and develop INCube, Inc.,
a consumer-run, 501(c)3, whose mission is to assist recipients in
developing businesses and service projects and find mainstream
employment. Under the umbrella of INCube is Inca Housing, a 50 unit
scattered-site apartment program, and Stage 2!/Youth Services, a peer
service for youth-at-risk. To me, having my job has allowed me to have
had the blessing to have had a dream and see it realized in my own
lifetime, and for this feeling I have no words. 

For me, most of my life was spent suffering from isolation and fear. As
a small child, I could hear music and voices, which made it difficult
for me to learn to read and write. We moved a lot and I always had to
adjust to a new school. I grew up mostly in Washington, D.C., where my
father worked for Robert Kennedy in the Office of Economic Opportunity.
During the "War on Poverty", his work was very important. He would take
us to the Indian reservation and migrant labor camps where he was
getting the government to do community development through housing,
education and employment. I didn't understand what he did, but I always
wanted to do it. My father got his education while there were still
quotas on how many Jews were allowed to be in school. 


Some of you may not know that the consumer movement began as the Mental
Patients' Liberation Front, and early leaders like Howie the Harp
modeled their actions after the black civil rights movement, and
somewhat later, the women's liberation movement. It was a time when
Martin Luther King said, "I have a dream!" and made people who were in
pain all over the country realize that they too had dreams and together
there was hope and action, which framed the whole period of time in the
sixties and early seventies. The word was "freedom." 


As a child, I had so many dreams but could never find a way to let them
out of my heart and make them real except through music and dance, yet
my learning disability prevented so many things. I was often afraid,
angry, and confused. It would take me many years to learn to read and
write. Being illiterate can make you feel like you are crippled. 


My life brought me to New York and, to make a long story short, I became
chronically ill from manic depression, the symptoms of which I suffered
for many years not knowing what it was. Sick and helpless, and almost
alone in New York as a film and television student at New York
University, I ended up sleeping in Union Square, and anyone who has
lived in the street and been sick knows that the events that brought me
to care were a miracle. After that, I lost touch with my family and
became a child of the system. The experience of Union Square and no care
left me with neurological damage. Hospitalized in the seventies, large
doses of thorazine and anti-psychotics were used. Now, I thank God that
people are recognizing that trauma is not psychosis. 

I was in the system for seven years. I had nine psychiatric
hospitalizations and was a client in Altro Sheltered Workshop, the
Postgraduate Center, FEGS, and Rehabilitation Services. I intermittently
lived in welfare hotels and adult foster care. I saw, heard, and felt
may things in these years. I had the same yearnings and pain as I did as
a child. I finally got a job at Macy's, through Rehabilitation Support
Services, currently the Bayside IPRT. 

I had the privilege of being able to heal well enough that I was able to
work my way through school to get degrees in Business Management
Economics and Media. In 1984, I was accepted at the City University Law
School at Queens College. It is one of the only law schools in the
country with a majority of minority students specializing in public
interest law. VESID helped me with this. I perfected reading and even
learned to read what wasn't written. I graduated law school in 1989,
with a Doctorate of Jurisprudence, which also in old English, makes me a
"Squire of the Court." Thus, I used the title "Esquire" to connote the
level of my professional education, but most people just call me Mimi. 


After school, I did street law and especially liked to study estates and
property law. My most intriguing concept as a theoretician is the
concept of ownership, and principles of economic development for
disenfranchised classes. 

In 1989, I was hired (for no money) as the Executive Director of INCube,
then only an idea on paper. Since no one would hire me as a litigator,
due to my mood swings, I seized the opportunity to have the potential to
create my own job. 


The conceptualization of INCube foresaw the application of
entrepreneurial techniques in rehabilitation as a vocational alternative
to sheltered workshops and day treatment vocational training. It was a
call to the need for the system to realize the hopes, dreams, skills and
capabilities of persons, many times remaining idle in institutions and
standard settings. We as peers, and like hearts, knew the need to bring
structure, pragmatic skills (like problem solving), and resource
development to our peers to assist them in carving out the reality of
their dreams. For me, the job is taking the spirit, the feelings, and
the wants and desires we have struggled with and assisting people to
know how to use law, contracting, legal structure, finance, accounting,
brokering, marketing, and management skills to become who we can be, to
become self-sufficient to afford our choices, have something you've
earned to go on a date or buy something that doesn't come from a thrift
shop, and can help you save money to pay for your own future. 

INCube currently runs two business programs, sponsored by the New York
City Department of Mental Health, Mental Retardation and Alcoholism
Services, to assist individuals into self-sufficiency. It has been a
great honor for us to have the support of Commissioner Neil Cohen, of
not only hearing us, but listening to us. 


I have learned, in my ongoing recovery, foremost to desire to live and
to nurture others in their lives. I put my health maintenance first, my
job next, and now I am trying to learn to build a home. If you would
like to come and meet us at INCube, please call us at ..... We are
trained professionals who also know what it feels like. 

 

Miriam Kravitz sits on the Executive Committee of the Bazelon Center for
Mental Health Law in Washington, D.C.; the Board of Directors of
Community Access; and CEFEC, as the United States Representative for
Social Firm Development and the Board of Directors of the National
Picnic for Parity, Inc. She is an occasional adjunct professor for
LaGuardia Community College, a trainer for Cornell School of Labor, and
has done consulting to the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, focusing her
advocacy on employment issues for persons with psychiatric disabilities.
She is co-author of the IRI document on self-employment for the United
States Department of Education.

 

 

 

 





 

 

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