Charles Richmond served as the first Executive Director of Caminar, a non-profit psychosocial rehabilitation agency based in San Mateo, for 15 years late '60s - '70s. He developed the agency from one program with two employees and a minuscule budget into a highly regarded national model with nine innovative and prototypical “therapeutic community” based psychosocial rehabilitation programs in California and Nevada including community based halfway houses (El Camino House and Tonopah House); a day treatment center and residential alternative to psychiatric hospitalization (Redwood House), more than 18 units of supportive housing (the Satellite Housing Program), and a community based coed residence for troubled adolescent offenders (Pedregal House).
After receiving his MSW degree from the University of Michigan in'59 he joined Santa Clara County Mental Health Services, psychiatric outpatient clinic. He then became the first psychiatric social worker to conduct group therapy at El Camino Hospital in Mountain View, said to be the first psychiatric unit within a general hospital in California.
At Miramonte Mental Health Services in Palo Alto, he was assistant to the director where he ran a psychiatric a treatment center and supervised Harvey House, a halfway house.
He is the author of several professional journal articles and two book chapters on therapeutic communities and milieu therapy in the field of psychosocial rehabilitation. He was asked to present a paper before the International Association of Social Psychiatry in Colombo, Sri Lanka but became so enamored with the people had tea with new friends instead.