The Institute for Community Living (ICL) is honored to announce that the Human Services Council (HSC) presented its retired Founder/President and Chief Executive Officer, Dr. Peter Campanelli, with the Leader of Influence Award. The award honors retired individuals from HSC-member agencies who have dedicated their lives to strengthening the human services sector. Dr. Campanelli, whom retired from ICL this past April, received this award at HSC’s Annual Leadership Awards Reception, which was held at Mutual of America on December 11.
HSC recognized Dr. Campanelli for his four-decade commitment to serving the community and for being the founding force behind ICL’s innovative programs. Dr. Campanelli’s compassion for those with mental illness began in the mid-1980s when he was researching the habits of people with serious mental illness in his doctoral thesis. Learning that most patients continually return for in-hospital treatment after they are released, Dr. Campanelli decided it was time to break that chain – and that he did.
In 1986, Dr. Campanelli founded the Institute for Community Living (ICL), a non-profit organization dedicated to providing individuals with mental illness the skills and resources needed to live and work more independently within their communities. Every year since, his leadership activities have been directed toward providing underserved, low-income consumers with community programs of a quality rarely available outside a university or tertiary care hospital setting. Guiding ICL from a start-up to a large behavioral healthcare network, Dr. Campanelli is credited for assembling a talented staff and earning resource support that garnered ICL 11 major regional and national awards for innovation and service excellence.
Throughout his career, Dr. Campanelli continued to break new ground. He developed the ICL Emerson-Davis Family Development Center, which was designed to unite homeless mothers living with serious mental illness who had been separated from their children. Being the first residence of its kind throughout the country, the program has won numerous awards from the American Psychiatric Association and others.
“On behalf of the Board of Directors, staff and consumers, I wish to extend heartfelt congratulations to Peter on his most recent accomplishment. Prior to joining ICL as President and CEO, I had the pleasure of collaborating and working with some of the best and the brightest the agency and the State has to offer and I am honored to resume this most critical and needed work of facilitation the betterment of some of the most vulnerable in the City. This is possible because of the foundation, leadership and influence of Dr. Peter Campanelli.” says David Woodlock, ICL President and CEO.
