There are a number of detrimental conditions resulting from these constraints. Perhaps the greatest is the undignified stigmatizing of our clients’ self-worth via citizen discountery. In all other related policy, it is the purpose of social welfare programs to integrate our population into the mainstream community as much as is feasible in order to provide everyone with the  same opportunities and privileges. Exclusion of services to only the discount citizen is antithetical to this aim. Another drawback is that it restricts our community presence to just certain sectors.

To address this (and other issues) it is recommended that we open our programs up to private clients as well. Though admittedly a radical idea, the projected benefits are many and nothing short of revolutionary. A short list of these follow:

• Improves our services: study after study shows that mixing low-income populations with middle and higher income populations serves to improve the quality of services for all populations. This is the basis for most integration initiatives although there has been a steady and strong oppositional backlash to this for some time. In our case, it is voluntary and not enforced, so backlash is not an issue.
• Improves our reputation: the addition of a number of higher income clients will give our services a more well-rounded reputation, including removal of discount stigmatization.
• Greatly increases our scope: the impact on our SEP recruiting will be enormous (see fee-based, below), and this should apply, via the halo effect, to all of our services (for example, Recovery and Dual Diagnosis).
• Enhancement of our Presence: our community Presence should be greatly enhanced alongside our Professional and Business network liaison.
• It diversifies our Portfolio: see Opportunities for Funding post for details on diversification of funding resources.
• Opens our service-structure to additional revenues in terms of fee-based payment. While keeping the legacy funding structure intact on a needs-based paradigm, we avail ourselves to an entirely new echelon of fee-based service structures. The impact on our Community Engagement Initiatives and especially SEP’s Recruiting Initiative, will be astonishingly effective. Not only will we reach a larger portion of our greater community, but we will be afforded broad opportunities to offer larger diversity in skill-sets, experience, and qualification levels as well as expanded outreach into deeper levels of community participation. These benefits alone will be greatly appreciated by our Business Community Leadership and liaison. There is nothing that prevents the application of hybrid fees (sliding scale) and ‘scholarships’ either. Scholarships, in fact, are a time-honored and very effective community engagement promotional.