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The International Initiative for Mental Health Leadership (IIMHL) and The International Journal of Leadership in Public Services are pleased to announce that an association has been recently established. The IIMHL will be using future issues of the Journal as a vehicle for the dissemination of its research and information and will be publishing an annual supplement to the Journal reporting on the IIMHL's annual leadership exchange and conference. As background to pieces for future issues, this article provides an introduction to the IIMHL.

As part of the 2007 International Initiative for Mental Health Leadership (IIMHL) Leadership Exchange and Conference, an international group of professionals met at the University of Cincinnati in Ohio. The focus of this exchange was the behavioural health workforce, leadership projects, and models of leadership and policy. As a part of this leadership exchange the working group (Cincinnati Group) developed the following action plan. The group set as our agenda the production of some tangible projects and useful guidance for IIMHL. These are summarised in this article.

Bill participated in the International Initiative for Mental Health Leadership exchanges in 2005 in Wellington New Zealand and in 2007 in Ottawa Canada. Bill was interviewed by Janet Peters (IIMHL) about his IIMHL experiences and the benefits for First Nations, Inuit and Métis peoples.

This article, a product of an IIMHL‐brokered partnership, concerns the requisites of today's health services information systems, and how an organisation in London, Ontario, Canada is responding to the addictions and mental health service information needs of the citizens of the Province of Ontario. The piece draws a parallel between theory regarding how stored data can be translated into information, knowledge, understanding and, ultimately, wisdom, and the practical needs of information and referral organisations as per their objective of providing their consumers with the value of current and accurate information. In the case of ConnexOntario ‐ funded by Ontario's Ministry of Health and Long‐Term Care ‐ the keys to this value are the powerful database that is used to house the data, and the innovative ‘front‐end application’ ‐ ConnexOntario eServices ‐ that allows users to input, retrieve and present the information as necessary. An emphasis is also placed on how eServices, in concert with the ConnexOntario database, helps promote the principle of mental health service leadership for its stakeholders, which is relevant as per the stated objective of the IIMHL.

Indigenous populations and communities around the world confront historical, cultural, socioeconomic and forced geographic limitations that have profound impacts on mental wellness. The impacts of colonialism and, for some indigenous populations, forced residential schooling and the resulting loss of culture and family ties, have contributed to higher risks of mental illness in these groups. In addition, there are barriers to healing and mental wellness, including inconsistent cultural competence of mainstream mental health professionals, coupled with the limited numbers of indigenous mental health professionals. The Wharerata Declaration is a proposed framework to improve indigenous mental health through state‐supported development of indigenous mental health leaders, based on a new indigenous leadership framework. Developed by the Wharerata Group (original membership noted in the acknowledgements section at the end of this article), the framework will be presented for support to the member countries of the International Initiative for Mental Health Leadership (IIMHL) in 2010.

The International Initiative for Mental Health Leadership (IIMHL) is a joint endeavour involving eight countries, and aims to facilitate the sharing of best practices and to provide support and collaboration for leaders of mental health services to develop robust and effective managerial and operational practices. The ultimate aim is to improve services for people who use them. An article from the IIMHL is included in every issue of The International Journal of Leadership in Public Services.This paper describes the key learning outcomes that came from the examination of the experience of eight American community‐based agencies that altered their service practices from an exclusive reliance on group and fixed models of service, to models of service that were exclusively individualised for the entirety of the people they served. It examines the key lessons learned as to what drove this process and what did not, as well as what some of the critical comparative outcomes were. A significant core factor cited repeatedly was values‐based leadership from within the agency concerned and a key result was that individualised services for every person served were very cost competitive in the systems they were in.

There is an established international evidence base on supported employment for people with severe and enduring mental health problems, and now a growing evidence base on how to successfully implement this into practice. The process involves substantial organisational development and change, and therefore effective leadership is critical. This article outlines some of the challenges to implementing supported employment services and explores what recent leadership theory could contribute to this process, as the Sainsbury Centre embarks on its Centres of Excellence Programme in England and seeks to build a wider learning community from our partnerships formed through the International Initiative for Mental Health Leadership (IIMHL).

When the International Initiative for Mental Health Leadership (IIMHL) was developed, one of the hopes was that the exchange visits among international sites would stimulate the development of collaborative working relationships. This article reviews one such collaborative project, the development and implementation of a comparative study of assertive community treatment teams, or assertive outreach teams as they are called in the UK and New Zealand.