It wasn’t that long ago that I was looking for a support group in the Los Angeles area. The one that I wanted to attend was about 35 miles away meeting at 7 p.m. on a week night. I would have needed to allow two hours to get there. I realized that a group was needed in my community.

I’m an organizational psychologist and had a lot of experience facilitating group learning and development. So, I started a support group in my neighborhood. It grew slowly at first but after a while we had so many people at our meetings that we had to split the group in two and then, we needed to start a second meeting.

The participants seemed to like that we had a clear and simple way that we did our meetings. They appreciated that we would review helpful material and worked on learning new skills. We regularly asked for feedback and tried to continually improve what we were doing. Ironically, people would travel from other areas because they felt that we had really great meetings.