Enrichment Through Employment was established in 1988 by parents of mentally ill adult children with the sole purpose of creating employment opportunities for people with mental illness. Through a great amount of dedication and hard work, a small office was opened part-time in 1993. The volunteers of this grass roots organization, led by a Board of Directors, have been tireless in their work to develop and expand the program.

The South Bay/Harbor communities of Los Angeles County are socially and economically diverse. They consist of small, medium and large businesses where the skills of ETE clients can be utilized. Educating the community about this untapped resource, and preparing clients to exercise their skills successfully is the focus of ETE. This is accomplished by providing Employment Preparation, Job Development, Job Placement and Employment support to our clients.

In 1994, the board formed a partnership with the Mental Health Association in Los Angeles County (MHA), a non-profit organization with a long history of assisting people with serious mental illness to integrate into the mainstream community. MHA helped ETE secure a stable funding base through a renewable contract with the State Department of Rehabilitation, which allowed the program to hire a full-time Job Developer and retain the half-time Employment Specialist. Following a long tradition of starting services and transferring them to qualified local non-profit agencies so communities may determine their own needs, MHA determined that ETE was strong enough to be partners with a local mental health contractor. Therefore, in July 1996, ETE became a program of Health View, Inc., a non-profit South Bay Harbor Area corporation that has provided comprehensive mental health services to their clients for close to 30 years.

Health View's function was to administer the Department of Rehabilitation contract. ETE was granted, its own 501O (3) non-profit status in January 1996, thereby making it easier to solicit donations for various projects, and to assure donors that their contributions will directly benefit ETE clients. In 1998, the Department of Rehabilitation contract was expanded to include a Work Adjustment Program. In 1999 ETE finally went completely on their own.

ETE programs are continuously being developed with "state of the art" research in learning theory, cognitive therapy and outcome studies to individualize the employment services for clients in the competitive market. We have added temporary employment services to companies in the South Bay area to further enhance our ability to assist companies and clients in enabling individuals with severe, persistent, mental illness to return to the workforce.

In 2005 the Board of Directors voted to take ETE off government funding and to function as a self-sustaining, revenue generating 501(c) corporation. The board also determined is would be in keeping with ETE's mission statement to only hire staff that were recovering from a severe mental illness.

In the last 4 years ETE has been providing light assembly and bulk/direct mail services to businesses in the South Bay. This direction is proving invaluable both in the development of staff that are recovering from severe mental illness and in generating knowledge about accommodating this disability.

While ETE still accepts and appreciates donations from individuals and community organizations, our goal is to become a corporation that donates to other organization that further goals of employment services to individuals recovering from severe mental illness.