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"A mother raising a child with mental illness is often caught in the vortex of needing public services, battling with negative public perceptions of the mentally ill, and trying to raise a family. The barriers to receiving help are steep and the blame for these children's illness is placed solely on their parents; most often, the parent most responsible for care and most vulnerable to blame is the mother. The intersection of race, class, and gender, coupled with the need to access a provider-driven system, robs such mothers of power, voice, and identity. This lack of voice, and the accompanying feelings of powerlessness, is not unique to the parents in this study. The quality of children's mental health services remains a serious concern for families, providers, and policy makers (Waxman, 2004). By the 1990s, the preponderance of negative outcomes for children with mental health challenges (Wagner, 1995), and the co-occurring strains on their caregivers (EvaluBrief, 2006) warranted substantial federal funding in the form of federal grants to create Systems of Care within states to improve outcomes for children experiences mental, emotional and behavioral health challenges. A core principle of the early SOC grants was the empowerment of parents through family-run organizations. The purpose of this study was to understand the lived experience of parents who staffed family-run organizations funded under SOC between1994 and 2011 in a single state. I used a qualitative, interpretive, phenomenological research method for this study. This method provided the lens and structure for data collection, analysis, and interpretation through which I attempted to understand the phenomenon of parents who staffed family-run organizations under SOC. All of the participants are parents who staffed a family-run organization and who were raising a child with mental health challenges. The two theoretical constructs that undergird this study are empowerment theory and feminist theory, with an emphasis on the role of identity (Groleau & Zelkowitz, 2009); specifically, a) identifying oneself as empowered (Zimmerman & Perkins, 1994); b) using voice, defined as the ability to identify your location in the social strata and to speak from your position about your position (Collin, 1989); and c) agency, which refers to taking measures to change the current situation through self-directed actions (Ahearn, 2001; Kabeer, 1999; Villaverde, 2008). This study shows the transformative power of the family-run organization model through a gendered lens that examines the roles of class, race, and gender. In just a few years, mothers with limited resources went from feeling powerless to feeling powerful, from feeling devalued to valuable. These feelings were accompanied by actions that speak to the behavioral component of empowerment, in a manner that is reflective of the unique ways that women behave in roles of leadership and power. In this research project, I have privileged parents' voices as a way to make meaning of their experiences as women and mothers; add to their positive concepts of self-identity; and refute the master narratives -- all while presenting lessons that can inform other families as well as providers and policy makers."--Abstract from author supplied metadata.