This appeal is a request for assistance and is based on our good faith opinions and conclusions.
Your help is desperately needed to save the Brief Therapy Center and MRI, one of psychotherapy's most influential think tanks, training centers, and clinics. MRI sits on valuable property in Palo Alto, California, and a Board with only a few licensed clinicians and too many business people is seeking to close the therapy projects and has already put the building up for sale for $12,000,000. We understand that there are buyers at the table as we speak.
The famous Brief Therapy Center and other projects have been given letters to vacate without a promise of funds or support for continuing to provide services relied upon by members of the community for decades. Existing live supervision programs, which train therapists from around the world and locally, will be terminated.
Rather than immediately instituting litigation and grievances with the appropriate legal bodies and agencies, we are asking the board to instead meet with a group of core interested people so we can remind them of MRI's mission and its ethical and legal responsibilities. If the Board insists on moving ahead, we plan to proceed with all appropriate legal avenues against past and present professional Board members for the violations suggested by the facts set forth in the article (see link below) from the Palo Alto Weekly. We have consulted with professionals and we believe there are strong grounds for our potential complaints.
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Dear past and present MRI Board of Directors,
We, the undersigned, are respectfully requesting you immediately put on hold the sale of MRI's building and the dissolution of the current structure of the nonprofits, MRI and MRIT. We understand that the organization faces difficulties but, as the best endowed nonprofit in the brief and family therapy world, we believe that MRI can resolve these problems without selling its space and changing its structure and mission. We request an opportunity to present our proposals in order to honor and preserve this important and vital part of the community.
Should the sale and transition of the structure of MRI move forward, we the undersigned will support an independent review by appropriate ethics and government institutions of violations suggested in the Palo Alto Weekly (set forth below), including abandonment of central parts of the mission of MRI and the appearance of self-dealing by the administration.
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https://paloaltoonline.com/news/2019/02/09/therapists-to-lose-home-at-landmark-mental-research-institute
Link to article, "Therapists to lose home at landmark Mental Research Institute: Palo Alto institution to become an endowment; building on the market by Sue Dremann / Palo Alto Weekly
