As a pre-launch to National Recovery Month in September, join CBHL and The POWER (People Organized for Wellness, Recovery and Empowerment) Coalition for a recorded conversation about the future of peer-led advocacy and recovery.
The POWER Coalition is a peer-led network of people with lived experience of mental health and/or addiction conditions including family members, youth, advocates and allies focused on protecting rights and promoting recovery for all.
During this 90-minute session, Coalition leaders introduced the organization, highlighted initiatives at the time of this recording, discussed future goals, and shared how partners and community members can become involved. Previously recorded on 8.25.2026.
More information on The POWER Coalition
Meet the Speakers
Paolo Del Vecchio
Director of Rising Recovery, CBHL Board Member
Paolo del Vecchio, MSW, a person in long-term recovery from mental health and addictions, has been a leader in the peer recovery movement for 40 years. He recently completed a 30 year career at the US Department of Health and Human Services’ Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) where he served in multiple roles including the Director of the Center for Mental Health Services and the founding Director of the Office of Recovery. Paolo is now an independent advocate to advance recovery-oriented policies and practices on national and international levels.
Lynda Gargan, PhD
Executive Director, National Federation of Families
Dr. Lynda Gargan is the Executive Director of the National Federation of Families, the nation’s largest advocacy organization supporting families whose children, adolescents, and adults living with mental health and/or substance use challenges. A psychologist by training, she brings decades of leadership experience in behavioral health systems, clinical practice, workforce development, litigation oversight, family peer leadership, and health policy. Dr. Gargan utilizes her lived experience as a family member and parent to inform her work. She is nationally recognized for advancing integrated, community-based care and improving access to services for families navigating complex behavioral health systems. Her work is particularly relevant to healthcare organizations, peer centers and insurers focused on outcomes, care coordination, and person-centered family support.
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Gargan is the Executive Director of the National Federation of Families, the nation’s largest advocacy organization supporting families whose children, adolescents, and adults living with mental health and/or substance use challenges. A psychologist by training, she brings decades of leadership experience in behavioral health systems, clinical practice, workforce development, litigation oversight, family peer leadership, and health policy. Dr. Gargan utilizes her lived experience as a family member and parent to inform her work. She is nationally recognized for advancing integrated, community-based care and improving access to services for families navigating complex behavioral health systems. Her work is particularly relevant to healthcare organizations, peer centers and insurers focused on outcomes, care coordination, and person-centered family support.
Healthcare Policy & Reimbursement Leadership – Dr. Gargan collaborated with SAMHSA and CMS to establish reimbursement for Family Peer Support Services and led the National Federation’s full implementation of the Family Peer Specialist Certification, creating a scalable workforce model grounded in lived experience and specialized training. She also served as Principal Investigator for SAMHSA’s first National Family Support Technical Assistance Center, a five-year initiative strengthening family support infrastructure nationwide.
Clinical Expertise & Complex Case Management – With expertise in co-occurring mental health and intellectual challenges, Dr. Gargan has overseen large-scale transitions from institutional to community-based care, including approximately 1,000 individuals in Texas and 1,200 adults in North Carolina under federal court litigation.
Behavioral Health System & Program Leadership – Her senior leadership roles span local, state, and federal behavioral health systems, including federally funded Supported Employment Technical Assistance Centers and an agency specializing in Intensive In-Home Family Therapy. Her background in research and class action litigation informs an outcomes-oriented approach to care quality and system accountability.
Community Health & Underserved Populations – A native of the coal fields of West Virginia, Dr. Gargan brings firsthand understanding of rural and Appalachian health disparities and the impact of the opioid crisis on families and healthcare systems.
Isaac Lara
Research Assistant at Mental Health for All Lab – Harvard University
Ernesto Isaac Lara (he/him) is a lived experience researcher, peer support advocate, and youth mental health activist. This fall, he joins UCLA’s Fielding School of Public Health as a Eugene Cota-Robles Fellow, pursuing a PhD in Health Policy & Management focused on youth peer support and mental health equity. Currently, he leads Lived Experience Initiatives at the Mental Health for All Lab at Harvard Medical School. Additionally, he serves as Board President of Youth MOVE National and Board Member of aves Mental Health, as well as advises the WHO and Lancet Psychiatry Commission on Integrating Lived Experience in Mental Health Research. Rooted in his lived experience as a queer, Mexican American living with complex trauma, Isaac centers lived expertise, mutuality, and health agency throughout his work.
Patty McCarthy
Chief Executive Officer of Faces & Voices of Recovery
Patty McCarthy, M.S., is the Chief Executive Officer of Faces & Voices of Recovery, a national recovery advocacy organization based in Washington, D.C. Prior to joining Faces & Voices, she was a senior associate with the Center for Social Innovation (C4), where she served as a deputy director of SAMHSA’s BRSS TACS initiative. Ms. McCarthy served for a decade as the director of Friends of Recovery-Vermont (FOR-VT), a statewide recovery community organization conducting training, advocacy and public awareness activities. In addition to public policy and education, her work has focused on community mobilizing, peer-based recovery support services, and peer workforce development. Ms. McCarthy has been instrumental in the development of a national accreditation for recovery community organizations and in the development of peer support standards. Ms. McCarthy holds a master’s degree in community counseling and a bachelor’s degree in business administration. She has been in long-term recovery from alcohol and drug addiction since 1989.
Vanessa Ramos
Senior Advisor at Disability Rights California
Vanessa Ramos is a U.S. drug war survivor and Senior Advisor at Disability Rights California, where she advances community-rooted, peer-centered systems change for people with disabilities, including people who use drugs and those living with addiction. Drawing on her lived experience, she champions independence, innovation, and recovery-driven solutions that reduce institutionalization and expand access to meaningful wellness supports.
Harvey Rosenthal
CEO of The Alliance for Rights and Recovery
Harvey Rosenthal serves as the Chief Executive Officer of the Alliance for Rights and Recovery (formerly NYAPRS) a peer-provider partnership that has been a leading state and national change agent for over three decades. Harvey Rosenthal has dedicated the last 45 to the promotion of public mental health policies and practices that advance the recovery, rehabilitation, rights, and full community inclusion of individuals with psychiatric disabilities and diagnoses.
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Under his leadership, the Alliance advocacy has helped to transform state and national mental health systems; increase access to rehabilitation, employment, and peer support services; and promote criminal justice-related mental health reforms. Harvey has helped to create several nationally acclaimed and replicated peer support, employment, and transformational training innovations.
He has worked to fight discrimination and human rights violations and to advance informed choice protections, self-directed care, and racial equity. Harvey’s efforts have received the highest honors from Mental Health America and the College for Behavioral Health Leadership, Psychiatric Rehabilitation Association, National Coalition for Mental Health Recovery and National Association of Peer Supporters.
He has served on the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law’s Board of Trustees for well over a decade. His interest in his work is personal, dating back to a psychiatric hospitalization at age 19.
Arc Telos Saint Armour
Co-Chair at Power Coalition
Arc Telos Saint Amour (they/them) is a disabled, queer and trans, Two-Spirit person of Mexican Native Indigenous descent (Coahuiltecan).
Growing up houseless and hungry, in and out of child welfare, mental health, and other systems, they eventually found themselves gang-involved and carceral system-impacted, which fortunately is where they found the power of peer support. Although still systems-impacted today, Telos has taken their identity as a victim/survivor of childhood trauma and developed that lived and living experience into a passion for systems change, policy reform, and abolitionist, decolonization practices.
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Believing in self-agency and bodily autonomy, Arc Telos considers themselves to be a peer supporter and a harm reductionist, trying to empower others while navigating their own co-occurring serious mental illness and substance use journey. This has led them to a deep belief in Native Indigenous Animism, radical empathy, and the power of holistic affirmation and healing. Professionally, Arc Telos spent over ten years as a national executive business developer, opening new businesses all over the US. Following this, Arc Telos has spent over ten years as an executive leader in the non-profit field, leading organizations through-out the nation centering Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (JEDI) practices and using trauma-informed and intersectionality-based frameworks. Currently they are the Executive Director of Youth MOVE National, deeply embedded within youth advocacy work, and the CEO of A.T. Consulting, as well as involved in several boards (Black and Pink, ForYouPage.Org, Unified Youth, etc.). Telos is of course more than just their career and identities. They are deeply passionate about all genres of music, documentaries, hiking and other outdoor adventures (in which they are infamous for achieving minor injuries and the loss of shoes), and absolutely refusing to be anyone other than Princess Peach in Mario Kart or Mario Party.
Fran Silvestri, MBA
Special Advisor to the President and CEO of Global Leadership Exchange, CBHL Board Member
Fran Silvestri, MBA, recently left the role as founding President and Chief Executive Officer of the Global Leadership Exchange (GLE), formerly the International Initiative for Mental Health Leadership (IIMHL) and International Initiative for Disability Leadership (IIDL), which he helped organize in 2003. GLE is jointly funded by ten countries, to build partnerships between mental health leaders in order to rapidly exchange knowledge of best and promising practices internationally.
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Before his work with GLE (formerly IIMHL), Fran was CEO of Monadnock Family Services (MFS) in Keene, NH. In this role he looked internationally to identify, and then replicate, innovative services that promote recovery and social inclusion for consumers of mental health services. Such services have included the Wyman Way Cooperative, an independent, non-profit corporation managed and operated by consumers of mental health services (based on the Trieste model). He was a founder of a state wide Integrated MH network in New Hampshire owned by six hospitals, 10 MH centers and the largest physician practice in the state.
Through his work with GLE, he has assisted in building international collaborations resulting in the rapid transfer of innovations and creative practices from one country to another.
The unique week long GLE Leadership Exchange is held every two years and is a unique global experience for key MH leaders to meet international colleagues, share knowledge and build partnerships. GLE also has facilitated a series of ongoing collaborations on specific topics and has partnered with the WHO on their Special Initiative working with 10 low and middle income countries to link key national mental health leaders to support developments.
Laura Van Tosh
Founder/Convener of Mental Health Policy Roundtable
Laura Van Tosh is a peer who has held policy positions at the National Association of State Mental Health Program Directors, University of Maryland, and the State of Oregon Health Authority. She is the founder of the Mental Health Policy Roundtable that met in Washington, D.C. and she started a local version of the policy roundtable in King County, WA. The roundtable brings newcomers and veterans of policy together in a neutral environment of learning and celebrated 25 years in 2023. Laura has written extensively about peer operated behavioral health care services and homelessness and has worked inside three state psychiatric hospitals. Her work is born from her experience as a patient turned activist and she has been involved with the peer movement since 1985. Laura is a member of Seattle Clubhouse of HEROHouse NW.
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In December 2021, Laura was
appointed to aves Mental Health (formerly Global Mental Health Peer Network) as a Country Executive Committee Member representing the United States. She has since been named a member of the Alumni group. In the summer of 2024, Laura joined the aves Mental Health Board of
Management and was elected as its chairperson. Laura has been recognized for her work in the behavioral health care field over many years and in 2022, she was awarded a Lifetime Advocacy Award from the Judge David L. Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law. In 2023, Laura was presented with a Sally Zinman Lifetime Achievement Award from the Alliance for Rights
and Recovery (formerly NYAPRS) for her leadership in advancing the recovery and rights of people with mental health and trauma-related challenges across the nation. Laura was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award at Peerpocalypse in 2026. Laura serves as a consultant with Meadows Mental Health Policy Institute. Laura appeared in two episodes of Lost Patients, a deeply reported podcast series produced by KUOW and The Seattle Times. Laura was a member of the Behavioral Health Joint Legislative and Executive Committee which developed a 5-year strategic plan for the behavioral health care system in Washington state. Laura was elected as a member of the National Academy of Social Insurance’s 2026 class in December 2025.