An innovative program for community-residing older adults with serious mental illness.

This chapter highlights the Community Connections Project, a program of innovative services for the seriously mentally ill elderly, funded as a three-year demonstration project by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Since its inception in 1988, the project has served'over 160 acutely or persistently mentally ill older adults each year. The project site, Senior Health and Peer Counseling in Santa Monica, California, has a fourteenyear history of providing innovative interdisciplinary health care services to older adults residing in the Westside of Los Angeles County. In the sections that follow, we will introduce a philosophy of community-based mental health care derived from Senior Health and Peer Counseling's perspective and philosophy, address the need for services for seriously mentally ill older adults, and describe how the Community Connections Project uses formal and informal community supports to optimize the capacity of older people to function at reasonable levels of health and well-being.