In the beginning…

…Deborah Anderson and Pat Deegan began PDA as a consulting company. We are both psychiatric survivors living in recovery. We traveled around the world lecturing and training on recovery and the empowerment of people with psychiatric disabilities. By 2005, we realized that personal appearances, lectures, training and videos could only go so far. We began to explore how to create recovery oriented tools and technologies that trained staff in vivo and that helped to get a message of recovery and hope to an even wider audience of peers. In collaboration with Professor Charlie Rapp and the good folks at the University of Kansas, School of Social Welfare, CommonGround was birthed in October of 2006.

In 2004 we were joined…

…by our accountant, Carrie Davidson, who later became PDA's first CFO. When Carrie left us at the end of 2010, we welcomed our current CFO, David Levenson. Melody Riefer joined PDA as Director of Training in July of 2008. Prior to that she worked with Pat and Charlie Rapp (at K.U.) as the coordinator of the first CommonGround Decision Support Center at the Wyandot Center for Behavioral Health in Kansas City, Kansas. CommonGround v1 morphed into a web based application (v2) under Charlie DeTar who is now working on his doctorate at the MIT Media Labs. John Nishinaga was friends with Charlie who referred us to John. He joined us as a contract developer (June 2007) and then Chief Software Architect in January of 2008. He also serves as our Chief Technical Security Officer. 

Sometimes we think of ourselves as…

…a small band of disruptive innovators who are mission driven and who strive to make a difference in the lives of people with psychiatric disabilities. We create tools, training and technologies that support the recovery of people with mental illness. We have fun, we love what we do and we give it our all…