Growth Happens When People Gather With Purpose
Behavioral health work asks a great deal from the people who carry it forward.
Every day, professionals across North Dakota step into difficult conversations, crisis situations, and deeply human moments that rarely fit neatly into a textbook or protocol. They support children in distress, families navigating addiction, veterans carrying invisible wounds, and communities trying to respond to challenges that continue to evolve faster than many systems can adapt.
The work is meaningful. It is also exhausting.
That is why spaces for learning, collaboration, and renewal matter.
The 2026 Summit on Behavioral Health in Energy Country is created to bring people together across disciplines, communities, and lived experiences because no single profession, agency, or organization can address these challenges alone. Stronger behavioral health systems are built through connection, shared knowledge, and practical strategies people can carry back into their work immediately.
Over two days in Dickinson, attendees will engage with speakers and practitioners exploring topics that directly impact communities across North Dakota and beyond. Conversations will include suicide prevention, youth behavioral health, addiction and recovery, trauma-informed care, emergency response, peer support, human trafficking awareness, resilience, and healing through creative expression.
What makes the Summit different is its grounding in real community realities. These are not abstract conversations disconnected from everyday life. They reflect the situations professionals encounter in schools, hospitals, clinics, emergency response systems, nonprofit organizations, tribal communities, law enforcement, foster care services, and homes throughout the region.
For professionals pursuing continuing education credits, the Summit also offers an opportunity to strengthen both knowledge and practice while fulfilling CEU requirements across multiple disciplines.
Approved continuing education opportunities include:
• Board of Nursing
• Board of Addiction Counseling Examiners
• Board of Social Work Examiners
• Emergency Medical Systems
• Foster Care
• Licensed Professional Counselors
• Peace Officer Standards & Training Board
• Peer Support
• Additional approvals pending
These credits represent more than hours on a transcript. They represent time invested in becoming more prepared, more informed, and more connected to the larger network of people working to strengthen behavioral health across our communities.
Featured keynote speaker Brandon Saho, creator of The Mental Game, will lead a powerful conversation on mental health, resilience, and the importance of honest dialogue. Additional presenters throughout the Summit will bring perspectives rooted in leadership, clinical practice, public health, lived experience, prevention, recovery, and community response.
Behavioral health challenges do not exist in isolation. Neither should the solutions.
When professionals gather with openness, humility, and a willingness to learn from one another, communities become stronger. New partnerships form. Better strategies emerge. People leave carrying not only information, but renewed purpose.
Join us June 17 and 18, 2026, at the Astoria Hotel & Conference Center in Dickinson, North Dakota.
Purchase tickets, explore sponsorship opportunities, or reserve an exhibitor booth at:
https://www.visionwestnd.com/summit