DUO Publishing House

10.02.2015📷

From the EPRA’s  recent projects has grown out new social enterprise –DUO publishing house.

NGO DUO publishing house was established in Tallinn, Estonia in November 2014 by a initiative group of three members – Külli Mäe, Marju Õunpuu and Anita Kurvits. We are open to new joiners. The idea of publishing house has grown out of the mental health professionals’ and peer counsellors’  cooperation in various projects.

We got the courage for establishing a new enterprise from the fact that among us were people, who have had some earlier experiences with the publishing process. No less important was the point that among our peer counsellors and recovering persons are many talented people with the linguistic background, who are educated philologists (Anita Kurvits, Silvi Udam) or have the practical experience in the field of translation and language editing (Marju Õunpuu, Dion Süda); a talented artist (Rein Meresaar); a video maker (Oliver Kukk); several IT-skilled people and many other smart people with good ideas.

Being a social enterprise we want to reinvest all the proceeds into new actions to support mental health and well-being.

Our main values are the recovery-centred mindset; faith in the capabilities of people with mental disorders and supporting their self-belief and confidence through the realisation of various publishing projects.

DUO publishing house provides employment to the authors of original texts, manuals and training materials; to the journalists, translators, artists,  designers and photographers.

Choosing our co-workers we  try to find them among recovering persons and peer counsellors, and turn our gaze elsewhere only when we can not find a person with necessary skills among them. For example, we found one of our translators, Dion Süda, via EPRA’s project „ Personal Choices in Labour Market“ (in 2012) through close co-operation with peer counsellor Urmo Reinik, project manager Külli Mäe, Urve Nõgu from translation company Morgenholm Ltd and translator Marju Õunpuu.

As members of our management board live in different parts of the country, we arrange our meetings via Skype conference calls, send e-mails and call each other. Each team member has different tasks. Marju is our CEO, creates a general vision, and also manages the sales and website; Anita is editor of our TARU newsletter and mediates the ideas, based on the recovering person’s  needs; Külli supports the formation of general management culture, and  deals with professional helpers oriented topics/products and marketing. Külli brought to the board structure, which allows us to be in continuous quality management circle, without feeling too much pressure. We implement the „plan-do-check-assess the results“ quality circle.

The word "DUO" itself refers to the cooperation between professional helpers and experience experts. DUO has became a some kind of trademark in Estonia – it could be said that it is a sign of good practice.

Our first book project got support from the CARe Europe, and in the February begins our first sales campaign for Wilken’s and Hollander’s book "How Clients Become Citizens."

We are interested in international cooperation with other similar publishing houses and organisations, who spread the same way of thinking.  More information