Motivational speaker, spoken word poet, catalyst for change
About Wellness Wordworks: Offering compelling spoken word poetry and motivational speaking to revolutionize mental health outcomes so people recover from lifelong diagnoses. Recruiting and nurturing volunteers for innovative programs that crowd-source community approaches to wellness so people can use connections with friends and their own personal strengths to overcome adversity.
About Corinna West:
- A Certified Peer Specialist who uses her recovery experience and her Master’s Degree in Pharmaceutical Chemistry to advocate for consumer directed mental health systems on a national level and in her home states of Kansas and Missouri.
- She uses her knowledge of overcoming 12 different mental health diagnoses to create social change through a combination of peer support, artistic performances, instigation at meetings, program development, and consumer controlled research.
- Member of the 1996 Olympic Judo Team, a 3 time national champion and silver medalist at the Pan American Games, she coached Judo for six years and introduced over 300 young athletes to the sport.
- Avid (or rabid) transportational bicyclist with more miles on her bicycle than her car for the last four years. She regularly rides on cross-state bicycle journeys for work conferences, art collection, and mobile advocacy.
- Creator of “Poetry for Personal Power,” a federally funded effort to use art and technology to help young adults access their friendships and personal strengths to overcome challenges in their lives.
“….I believed in the work ethic.
I believed anything was possible with enough persistence.
Anything that got in my way, I just overcame the resistance.
I chose mere subsistence, and I went the distance.
Everything else that happens for the next 12 years: recovery from mental illness, earning a masters degree, being homeless, married and divorced, four career changes, making a lot of friends…
Everything is impacted by my commitment to my dreams.
Because I can.
And What makes you think I play the piano with my fingers?”-Corinna West “Because I Can” The Olympic Poem
About this site: This website is a blog, a catalog of advocacy efforts, descriptions of programs created, and links to artistic performances available. This is an ongoing storytelling repository about overcoming adversity by building a brand new life filled with adventure, fun, miracles, friends, joy, and accomplishment. This is a central connection point for Facebook, Twitter, You-Tube, Flickr, and other social networking sites sharing respectful, revealing, revved up, responsible work to revolutionize the mental health system. We need to radically shift our funding to new approaches that move beyond the status quo and actually cure people of their difficulties.
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