Founding Board of Directors

Wilda L. White is a psychiatric survivor, a Mad activist, an attorney, a business leader, and the co-founder of MadFreedom Advocates, Inc.

She chaired the Vermont Mental Health Crisis Response Commission, led Vermont Psychiatric Survivors, and served as the inaugural executive director of the Thelton E. Henderson Center for Social Justice at UC Berkeley School of Law, her alma mater. Earlier, Wilda was a management consultant with McKinsey & Company, a partner in a San Francisco plaintiff’s litigation firm, and an assistant city editor at The Miami Herald during its Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of Hurricane Andrew.

A champion of survivor-led knowledge, anti-oppression practices, and strategic organizing, Wilda blends legal expertise, policy insight, and movement history to cultivate a nationwide network focused on ending psychiatric coercion and establishing collective liberation as the prevailing social paradigm.

Hilary Melton is the founding executive director of Pathways Vermont, a nonprofit transforming mental health and homelessness services through person-centered approaches. Since 2009, she has led the organization’s expansion into a statewide agency offering Housing First and alternative mental health services. With over two decades in mental health advocacy, Hilary is dedicated to ending coercion and advancing approaches that center personal agency and self-determination. Her leadership is informed by her lived experience of mental health challenges, grounding Pathways Vermont’s mission in empathy, authenticity, and the power of peer connection.

Hilary is the Chair of the Vermont Peer Workforce Development Initiative Steering Committee. Before founding Pathways Vermont, she directed New York City’s first Housing First program (1992) and brought the model to Vermont in 2009—the first rural implementation in the U.S. Hilary also holds an MFA in poetry.