Youth Wellness Hubs Ontario (YWHO), the Ontario Integrated Youth Services initiative, welcomes 10 special community sites that will implement YWHO’s data collection platform and tools. The announcement can be viewed here.

These sites, known as My Wellness Passport sites, will provide youth aged 12-25 with enhanced measurement-based care for mental health and wellness. The name, My Wellness Passport (MWP), was chosen by youth for the digital platform by which youth share information about themselves.  The sites were selected following a call for proposals that was launched in June 2021.

These sites join the 14 YWHO hubs, creating a total of 24 sites now able to collect and report on the same data. To see the full list of YWHO sites offering services, please see the YWHO website.

The My Wellness Passport Project is supported by the Bell-GBF Partnership, Medavie Health Foundation and Balsam Foundation.
 

Photo: ACCESS Open Minds Acadian Peninsula (NB)

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The Government of New Brunswick has announced funding for six community sites, including three sites that were created under the ACCESS Open Minds project. The announcement can be accessed here.

This support will help ensure that youth in New Brunswick can access barrier-free, youth-friendly mental health services at a time when more young people are reporting mental health issues.

The announcement followed the release of an interim report by New Brunswick’s child and youth advocate’s office recommending that the ACCESS Open Minds approach be scaled up across the province.
 

As part of the Bell-GBF Partnership, Bell Let’s Talk has launched a new blog series about youth mental health. Over the next months, the series will explore how Integrated Youth Services (IYS) is transforming  youth mental health across the country through the perspectives of youth, families and service providers.

The first blog post in the series features the Regional Strategic Coordinator Project in New Brunswick, which is expanding integrated supports for youth facing mental health and addiction challenges in Kent County and Miramichi. The Regional Strategic Coordinators work alongside community service providers to ensure youth aged 13-21 can access the care that they need for success in school and life. The Project will help to complement and strengthen other initiatives in youth mental health, such as Integrated Service Delivery (ISD) and the youth hubs (see above), which seek to build integrated, high-quality services that are easily accessible to youth.

Bell Let’s Talk connected with Martin Moir, Regional Strategic Coordinator in Miramichi, and Kai Gosling, Provincial Strategic Coordination, to discuss what it means to support young people and to be all in for children and youth. To read the full interview, and to follow the blog series for future posts, click here.

The Regional Strategic Coordinator Project is supported by the GBF-Bell Partnership, the Government of New Brunswick and United Way Greater Moncton and Southeastern NB.

 

The Government of Alberta has announced a $7.3 million commitment to support the expansion of youth mental health hubs. The announcement can be viewed here.

The expansion will be led by the Canadian Mental Health Association (CMHA) of Alberta and will support 8 youth hubs across the province, in communities of 100,000 people or less, which will provide Alberta’s youth with a range of services, including mental health and addiction, primary care, social services, and school-based supports. More information about the project can be found here.