06/19/2026
Yesterday was a special day, a full-circle moment for my advocacy journey in Contra Costa. It was an honor to join Supervisor John Gioia, who appointed me to the Contra Costa Mental Health Commission back in 2006. That was the beginning of my advocacy journey.
When Supervisor Gioia interviewed me 20 years ago, I told him that I was going to be a rabble-rouser. I had a vision of hope, but I was clueless about how to ignite change effectively.
But I was the daughter of Charlie Clarke and the niece of Henry Clarke, both forces of humanity and teachers of truth, equality, fairness, and hope. And, they were both union organizers who led people from hope to action and change. I have used my Clarke family lessons, DNA, and the teachings of so many mentors to shape my own path in SMI activism over the past 20 years.
I am proud of where I come from and where I have been. But I'm not done yet. There is more dreaming to do…together.
Yesterday, I spoke about my personal and advocacy journey from a vision of hope to action and change. Below are the words I used to express my truth for equality, fairness, and hope for .
#𝐍𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐆𝐢𝐯𝐞𝐔𝐩
My Speech at the Brookside Mental Health Rehabilitation Center groundbreaking ceremony:
"Thank you, Dr. Tavano, Dr. Colfax, and Supervisor Gioia, for inviting me to join this celebration of a dream I have carried for over twenty years.
I am Teresa Pasquini, a mom on a mission to improve our local, state, and national mental health systems. That mission is grounded in a fierce determination to end the suffering I have witnessed in my community, my state, my country, and my own home. This suffering is unnecessary and can be prevented if we choose to learn together, improve together, and shatter the status quo together.
My journey is anchored in a strong social justice upbringing, and the trauma of watching my beloved son fall off every jagged edge of every broken piece of California’s public and private mental health systems. The cuts run deep—mostly for our son, but also for his sister, his dad, and me.
To understand why I became so passionate, I need to provide what I call 'data of the soul.'
My son, Danny, lives heroically with a co-occurring severe mental illness and substance use disorder. Diagnosed in his teens, Danny has spent much of his adult life in locked psychiatric facilities. He has been 5150’d over forty times, deemed gravely disabled at the age of nineteen, and has had his LPS Conservatorship renewed annually for the past twenty-three years. He has survived multiple su***de attempts, involuntary holds, revolving hospitalizations, homelessness, and incarceration. It was a living nightmare that repeated over and over again.
As the mother of a son who has been exiled to eleven different counties as a gravely disabled conservatee, I was determined to prevent another family from experiencing that deliberate discrimination. That is why, for the past twenty years, I have sought authentic partners in care.
Fortunately, I found those partners at Contra Costa Health Services in 2009. As a founding member and five-year Chair of the Behavioral Health Care Partnership at Contra Costa Regional Medical Center, I was given a seat on the hospital’s Executive Team. It gave me a real chance to influence policy, shift culture, and develop an authentic, person and family-centered improvement process on our county’s psychiatric units.
That work became nationally known and brought down my anger wall. It taught me that systems—not people—are designed to harm. It taught me to speak up for families who do everything in their power to intervene. It taught me to speak up for those who have no family. It taught me to dream big, to know when to push hard, and when to push even harder.
In 2019, while Danny was in a facility in Merced County, I panicked about where he would go next. So, I joined my friend, Lauren Rettagliata, on a 3,000-mile journey to visit over twenty-two facilities across California. We set out to find a place like home for families like ours—families whose loved ones are forced to live in inappropriate housing, stuck behind jail doors, locked hospital doors, in cardboard tents, or the back bedrooms of aging parents’ homes.
We co-authored a paper, published on Mother’s Day in 2020, sparking a conversation about what we coined 'Housing That Heals.' We focused on the drivers of despair, disparity, and discrimination that force many severely mentally ill individuals to get stuck and suffer without access to appropriate medically necessary treatment before tragedy. We shone a light on the forgotten populations, levels of care, and policy gaps that created human log jams and prevented system flow.
Our paper was a call to action. We wanted leaders to understand that there is no one-size-fits-all solution to this crisis. The crisis starts in our family homes and spreads across city, county, and state lines. It is a crisis of our shared humanity, driven by a refusal to treat severe mental illness as a brain illness rather than a behavioral choice.
Since we released that paper, the vision has evolved in California. Governor Newsom and the legislature have put their stakes in the ground with major reforms and funding that have helped pave the way for secure facilities like this one, where we are here today to put our shovels in the ground.
On our 3,000-mile journey, Lauren and I visited this campus to see the Brookside Shelter and Cali House. During that visit, we saw this empty building. We also saw tents lining the fences surrounding the property. We started asking questions: Could this be a future site for a step-down program from acute or jail-based care? This was the exact missing level of care in Contra Costa—the number one need identified by our community.
In 2021, Dr. Tavano asked Lauren and me to join the BHCIP Steering Committee. It has been my privilege to collaborate with county and community partners to ensure Contra Costa successfully secured the state grants needed to support our gravely disabled neighbors.
I have worked for twenty years to build authentic partnerships as an activist for the most severely mentally ill—a population that included my son, and my brother prior to his passing in 2025. Today, I call myself a 'recovering angry mom,' because of the partnerships I have formed across our public health and safety systems.
My husband and I grew up in Richmond and raised our family here. Our roots run deep. And while our beloved son is still not living near us, I know that this project will mean that future sons and daughters will be able to heal close to home.
Let’s put our shovels in the ground together today and start building a missing level of Housing that Heals in Contra Costa.
Thank you." See less
Kerry Martin
·
·
by Author
Teresa Pasquini, my heart is overflowing reading this! What a breathtaking, full-circle milestone indeed. To stand there 20 ye… See more
Reply
