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• Global Initiative on Psychiatry – Hilversum (lead organization) 
• Global Initiative on Psychiatry – Sofia, Bulgaria (responsible for its implementation and management in Bulgaria)
• Bulgarian partners: Ministry of Labor and Social Policy, Ministry of Health, Blagoevgrad Municipality, National Center for Public Health, South West University in Blagoevgrad, Medical College in Blagoevgrad, Bulgarian Institute for Human Relations - New Bulgarian University

This project tackled one of the core problems, faced by Bulgarian mental health system: institutionalism. It is translated into: outdated approach in service delivering, semi-voluntary confinement of mentally ill people to closed "asylums", which is equivalent to lifetime imprisonment, to isolation and lack of any perspective in life. GIP-Sofia's initiative meant to combat this malignant model of health care and to set up a paragon to be implemented throughout the country. In the course of three years we succeeded in creating an interactive multifunctional system of community mental health services, offering a day care center (DCC), sheltered home (SH) and an information center for mental health (ICMH) with a functioning specialized information line, geared for assisting the adaptation and reintegration of people with severe mental illness (SMI) into society. And the scope of our activities expanded beyond the mere construction of a mental-health-service compound and staff-supply.

In the end, the project resulted in:

• Developing an organizational framework to support the management and continuous improvement of community mental health services;  
• Capacity building: training of mental health professionals, users and relatives to work in a community-based setting;  
• Sensitizing the community of Blagoevgrad to the problems of people with severe mental illness and participation in the process of establishment of the services;  
• Elaborating programs, methodology and guidelines for the replication of the model of community-based mental health services;  
• The development of sustainable training programs as following: Master degree program in Psychosocial rehabilitation in the South West University and specialization in psychiatric nursing in the Medical College in Blagoevgrad.

The best proof for the sustainability of this initiative is the number of planned or already functioning concerns of this type, developed nationwide, by other organizations, who used our project as the basis for the development of their complexes of community-based services.