
Frayme Learning Institute 2023
GREAT BIG STORIES: CREATING CHANGE, TOGETHER
February 22-23, 2023 | #Frayme2023
GREAT BIG STORIES: CREATING CHANGE, TOGETHER
February 22-23, 2023 | #Frayme2023
Exhibitor Booth Applications and Registration now open
The Learning Institute is one of Canada’s only nation-wide conferences solely dedicated to youth mental health and substance use (YMHSU) system transformation. It provides a unique opportunity to bring together different players in the sector across diverse disciplines, backgrounds and experiences to drive knowledge into action.
It’s time to share your Great Big Story.
Building off the momentum of Frayme’s Great Big Stories Grant Program, #Frayme2023 will focus on showcasing stories of partnership, collaboration and knowledge sharing to improve the Canadian YMHSU system. Great Big Stories is all about supporting community organizations, our Network Partners, and Groundbreakers to share their stories about initiatives that are leveraging data, indicators and standards to increase inclusivity, diversity and equity through meaningful engagement. Whether it’s stories of youth working alongside researchers, practitioners collaborating with funders, caregivers and advocates informing policy makers or some mix of all the above - we want to hear and amplify the stories of how your relationships and partnerships have led to system transformation and effective, evidence-based services for youth and their families.
After all, a system that is connected, is a system that is more capable of achieving our ultimate goal - to ensure that all youth and their caregivers have the right support, at the right time, within the right context.
The 2023 Frayme Learning Institute will be delivered as a hybrid event, mixing online and inperson activities so that attendance is not limited by geographic or accessibility factors. As the inaugural Learning Institute was hosted in Ontario, this year the in-person portion of this year’s Learning Institute will be hosted in Vancouver, British Columbia as a reflection of Frayme’s national mandate.
Can’t make the in-person event? Don’t fret - your experience at #Frayme2023 will be fueled by engaging and thought-provoking activities including workshops, plenaries and networking sessions, regardless of whether you choose to attend in-person or virtually..
Frayme’s Learning Institute has multiple focus areas this year to align with the work of our network partners and Frayme’s impact areas. As a virtual event, you will once again have access to all the content and can pick and choose how to experience the event in a way that is customized to your preferences:
Because we really, really need it. The system is fragmented and siloed and Frayme is on a mission to build bridges through collaboration and sharing. Through the Learning Institute we will:
Provide Frayme partners and stakeholders, including youth, caregivers, and advocates, an opportunity to share, learn, and collaborate, in order to bridge the gap between knowledge and practice to transform the YMSHU system;
Help build a better system that can serve all youth and caregivers, while advancing the value and integration of lived experience in service design, delivery, and evaluation;
Explore new approaches and alternative therapies for YMHSU services that might be scaled up in other jurisdictions and communities across Canada;
Promote the consistent use of data and evidence in the design of services;
Unite national and international partners across diverse YMHSU disciplines, backgrounds, and experiences and facilitate knowledge mobilization and information sharing;
Create a welcoming and safe space to discuss YMHSU from equity, diversity, inclusivity, and accessibility perspectives, including the factors that need to be considered in designing services and systems that will be contextually, culturally and geographically relevant to Canada’s diverse youth and families.
Are you looking to mix and mingle with the changemakers of the Canadian YMHSU space? If so, we invite you to apply to be an exhibitor for #Frayme2023! This year, the #Frayme2023 Learning Institute will be a hybrid event with the in-person portion being hosted at the Hyatt Regency Vancouver. Please see below for rates and information around exhibitor booths:
Non-profit: $400 + HST
For-profit: $500 + HST
Frayme Network Partner: $350 + HST
GST/HST Registration #729061325
As an exhibitor you will receive:
To ensure booths have an increase in traffic, we have scheduled plenty of breaks and networking time to allow attendees to visit booths and learn more about exhibitor organizations.
Becoming an official sponsor for #Frayme2023 will provide your organization with visibility and prominence to all those working within the Canadian youth mental health and substance use from coast-to-coast-to-coast. In addition to inclusion in the promotional activities leading up to the Learning Institute, you will benefit from brand awareness and networking opportunities with a highly engaged and targeted audience of youth and caregiver advocates and participants with lived experience, researchers, service providers, policy makers and others.
Please refer to the table below to see what is included in each level of sponsorship for the Frayme Learning Institute (subject to change):
Please contact us if you are interested in sponsorship opportunities for #Frayme2023
Agnes Chen is a proud mom of 4, a Registered Nurse, and the founder and Executive Director at Starlings Community, a not-for-profit whose mission is to protect the health and promote the healing of youth exposed to the stress and stigma of a parent’s substance use. Over the last 5 years, she has utilized her personal and professional experience to lead a national movement that recognizes the harm that substance use stigma imposes on the health and well-being of Canadian youth. Today, as a passionate advocate, she aims to ensure that families affected by intergenerational trauma and problematic substance use are protected from systemic harm and have equitable access to barrier-free resources that support their well-being within a compassionate society.
Alexa Bol, MA, Knowledge Exchange Manager is a seasoned Knowledge Exchange professional with an MA in Community Studies and Global Change and a Post Graduate Certificate in Global Health Challenges. She is very experienced in working with systems change that is centered on collaboration, asset-based system mapping, and working with diverse cultural and indigenous groups. She brings expertise in knowledge translation and exchange, strong facilitation skills and a passion for helping people access the support they need when they need it. Alexa has worked for several years in community development in different Canadian cities and internationally, creating systems change in a manner that reflects and includes the local community and celebrates and builds on existing strengths. She has led Knowledge Exchange initiatives in mental health across the life span from youth to older adult populations as well as provided training to mental health leaders, providers and advocates as they implement new interventions to create positive change in the mental health and addictions sector.
Alexandra is a passionate advocate and volunteer at Starlings community who applies her lived experience of having a parent with substance use disorder to advocate for youth. By centring lived experience, utilizing anti-oppressive approaches and community-owned scholarship, Alexandra hopes to empower people marginalized due to substance use stigma to share their truths. She believes that focalizing lived experience on a systemic level is the cornerstone of effective social change.
Alisa Simon brings more than 30 years of leadership experience in health-care access and non-profit management to her role as Executive Vice President, E-mental Health Strategy and Chief Youth Officer at Kids Help Phone. As a champion of innovation, Alisa is integral to the organization’s development of virtual health solutions for youth. Using comprehensive data and research, Alisa drives improvements in e-mental health services and strategies that respond to evolving technologies and the changing needs of young people. Under Alisa’s leadership, Kids Help Phone has evolved from a phone-based helpline to a comprehensive solution that fully integrates a growing number of access points, programs and resources. In her role, Alisa oversees Kids Help Phone’s 24/7 clinical services as well as the organization’s’ knowledge translation, quality assurance and equity programs. Alisa holds a Master’s degree in Public Health from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She received the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal in 2013 and was named the Digital Health Canada 2021 Digital Health Executive of the Year.
Allison is a fourth-year Child, Youth and Family Coop student at the University of Guelph. Throughout her life, she knew she wanted to make an impact on young people but spent a lot of time wondering how. Through her studies and experiential opportunities, Allison discovered her passion for mental health advocacy. Her experience as an Equity and Diversity Coordinator at The Grove allowed her to navigate the ways in which organizations can make mental health support more accessible to young people. Over the past year she has worked with various youth, organizational leaders and working groups to collaborate, learn and reflect on various subjects surrounding mental health. In particular, Allison had an impactful experience over the summer as a member of an Indigenous Reconciliation workshop which opened her mind to the importance of Indigenous sovereignty and relationship-building. Allison looks forward to continuing her education relative to mental health and contributing her voice to her community.
Alysha Oliver (she/her) is the Community Engagement Manager for Huddle, Manitoba’s Integrated Youth Services (IYS) initiative. She lives in Treaty 1 Territory, which is now known as Winnipeg. Alysha supports Huddle’s provincial Youth Advisory Council and the Huddle Network. Her interests and experience include engaging youth and adults with lived/living experience with mental health, substance use, and houselessness. She also enjoys working with technology and supporting Huddles’ digital projects. She previously worked with Winnipeggers who are homeless or underhoused and worked in the tech field in technical project management before coming to Huddle. Alysha has a Bachelors of Recreation Management and Community Development from the University of Manitoba.
Andréanne brings more than 10 years of combined experience in counselling and youth support program management and development to Kids Help Phone. In her role, she oversees service and youth mobilization programs such as Resources Around Me, Counsellor in the Classroom, Good2Talk and the National Youth Council (NYC). She also brings leadership to services for the organization’s focus communities through Kids Help Phone’s Indigenous Initiatives and Equity Programs. She’s also responsible for the clinical training and quality assurance of counselling services. Andréanne has dedicated her career to leveraging her passion for mental health support and skills to advance young people’s rights to autonomy and self-determination in help seeking and receiving support. Holding a master’s degree in clinical sexology, Andréanne uses her experience in providing counselling and therapy to young people and adults in service program design and development. Andréanne has also been involved in the development of several youth mental health and wellness services and projects such as Live Chat counselling, resource development and more. She 9 / 13 has promoted and advocated for the understanding of diverse perspectives in order to achieve positive outcomes while maintaining an open and empathy-driven environment. She has a passion for learning, believes in values-based work and is keen to imagine and action new and improved ways for youth to get the help they need, in the way they need it most.
Avneet Dhillon (she/her/hers) is a South Asian women who is studying and researching at UBC. Her research focus is youth mental health and substance use, primarily minority youth in Canada. In her free time she enjoys creating art, listening to music, and volunteering.
Cassandra (she/her) is a volunteer with Starling's community and a student studying criminology at the University of Alberta. In light of her lived experience, vulnerability, and passion for social justice, Cassandra is paving the way for a society that supports youth who are impacted by the stigma of a parent's substance use. Based on her own experience as a youth losing her father and uncle to an overdose, finding a peer mentor group through the Starlings community has positively impacted her life. She encourages others to seek out people who understand, accepts, and validate them and their experiences and wishes for a future that has more resources and supports for youth and families impacted by the stigma of SUDs.
Cassia attended the University of British Columbia for her Master of Science in Interdisciplinary Oncology. She brings three years of experience in research and two years of experience in project management and research trial coordination and has recently moved into the mental health research space. Her current projects are centered around working with and integrating youth into research that aims to better understand the care needs of youth and how these needs differ based on demographic, clinical, and community factors; and to understand and evaluate service innovations required to align the diverse needs and priorities of youth populations. Outside of work, Cassia enjoys recreational sports and reading, and world building for a D&D campaign.
Chealsea De Moor is a Knowledge Broker with the Canadian Centre on Substance Use and Addiction. She has been with the center for 5 years. Her present areas of focus include virtual supports and services, 2SLGBTQ+ substance use health and impaired driving. She has also been involved with CCSA’s Canadian Substance Use Cost and Harms project since 2017, in both research and knowledge mobilization capacities. She is presently the co-chair of CCSA’s equity, diversity and inclusion committee. Chealsea holds a master’s degree in forensic psychology from Carleton University. Her Masters studies focused primarily on the substance use and mental health needs of women offenders. She is also a former employee of the Correctional Service Canada Research Branch – Women Offender’s Unit.
Christina Katan, MPH, is a Knowledge Broker at the Canadian Centre on Substance Use and Addiction. Her work focuses on improving youths' opioid treatment service experiences and outcomes by co-developing, implementing, and measuring youth-centred opioid use treatment service innovations. Christina holds a Bachelor in Health Sciences from the University of Ottawa. She also attended the University of Edinburgh in Scotland where she earned a Master of Public Health focusing on developing public health interventions and qualitative research methods.
Cyndy Dearden is the inaugural Executive Director for The Grove Wellington Guelph (an official site of Youth Wellness Hubs Ontario). She is responsible for bringing the vision to fruition by working collaboratively with the communities of Wellington County and Guelph.
Prior to joining this project Cyndy was the Homewood Research Institute’s (HRI) first chief development officer. She was responsible for working with the Institute’s board and staff leadership to develop donor relationships and build community and philanthropic support for the Institute.
Before joining HRI, Cyndy served for almost a decade with the Huntington Society of Canada as the vice-president of development and marketing. Her work there included building a strong donorcentred organizational culture, establishing performance metrics and accountability processes, and expanding participation in Huntington-related clinical trials.
Previously, Cyndy held a number of positions in Kitchener and Guelph, starting her career at the University of Guelph including academic counselor, admissions counselor and general manager of the Conference Office. An active community volunteer, Cyndy was Chair of the board of directors for YMCA-YWCA of Guelph and the Guelph Community Foundation as well as sitting on a number of 10 / 13 committees and community initiatives.
Deanna’s passion, optimism and enthusiasm for equity and reconciliation are rooted in her Kanien'kehá:ka and settler ancestry. A member of Six Nations of the Grand River, Deanna has shared her knowledge and experience with Indigenous youth and communities for over 23 years as a strategic communications consultant, public speaker, college educator, volunteer and through her work as Media and Communications Director at Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation.
Deanna was thrilled to join Kids Help Phone in 2018 as manager of Indigenous Initiatives. In that role she established an Indigenous Advisory Council and under their leadership developed Finding Hope: Kids Help Phone’s Action Plan for Supporting First Nations, Inuit and Metis Young People. Through org-wide collaboration and dedicated Indigenous Initiatives team, Finding Hope has resulted in more Indigenous youth reaching out to KHP than ever before.
Since 2020 Deanna has been honoured to fulfill the role of Director, Indigenous Initiatives and Equity Programs where she leads a talented team responsible for ensuring KHP programs, operations, and services are equitable and accessible to Newcomer, Black and Indigenous young people from coast to coast to coast.
Dwight Ballantyne grew up in Montreal Lake Cree Nation, a remote north Saskatchewan First Nation, until the age of 21. He always felt that he was invisible to the rest of the world that existed outside of his community. When a once in a lifetime opportunity to move to BC presented itself in 2016 he took a leap of faith and left everything he knew behind. Once he had a chance to adjust to his new lifestyle, he realized that many of the new people he met did not even know what a reserve was. This realization instilled a desire to find a way to bridge the gap between remote Indigenous communities and the rest of Canada. In 2019, Dwight founded The Ballantyne Project with the goal of raising awareness about what it was like to grow up in a remote First Nation
As Youth Programs Manager, Madeleine (Maddy) Curry draws from her experience in the arts and in youth/young adult programming, including over five years of experience working with newcomer youth in Canada, to develop youth engagement initiatives at Kids Help Phone. She is passionate about peer support, youth empowerment and mentorship, and strives to contribute to and foster inclusive communities both offline and online. In addition to overseeing KHP’s Peer-to-Peer Community, she is honoured to be the staff lead for the National Youth Council at Kids Help Phone, where she works collaboratively with Council members to integrate a youth voice across the organization.
Marion is a clinical social worker and mental health and addictions leader who has worked in the community sector in various positions for nearly 30 years. Marion is the Chief Executive Officer of the Canadian Mental Health Association (CMHA) for Manitoba and Winnipeg. Marion has served as the Executive Lead for Strategic Partnerships with the CMHA National Office. She currently serves on the Mental Health Promotion Expert Working Group for the International Union for Health Promotion (IUHP) and the Public Health Council Leaders with the International Institute for Mental Health Leadership (IIMHL). Marion is passionate about recovery, social justice, system transformation, co-design, and innovation to advance mental health and wellbeing for the entire population.
Maya is a grade 10 student and has been working with Foundry since November 2021 as a Youth Advisory Committee member. She is interested in learning about mental health and ways she can support people around her.
Sonya has been involved as a Foundry Youth Researcher since April 2022 and has immensely enjoyed hearing the diverse thoughts and opinions of the youth she interviewed. She recently started her undergraduate degree in Honours Integrated Science at Western University. She is passionate about problem-solving and innovation in health, and hopes to incorporate those aspects into a future research career. Outside of academia, Sonya enjoys making art and music, playing netball, and exploring the outdoors.
Yumna Farooq is currently a Youth Wellness Coordinator with The Grove Youth Wellness Hubs Ontario. Previous to her current role, Yumna has worked with youth and community members to help create the Grove Hubs’ Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Indigenous Reconciliation Framework . Her educational background includes a B.Sc. from the University of Guelph, and an advanced diploma in Child and Youth Care from Humber College.
Katie Louttit is the Community Development and Collaborative Lead for the Youth Hubs Alberta initiative. Katie is a passionate advocate for 'doing things differently', in particular with moving the work of collaboration forward. She believes in the power of community design, particularly when partnered with clear support structures and initiative alignment. She truly believes that we are better together.
As Manager of Strategic Initiatives at Choices for Youth (CFY), Jen works at the intersection of impact measurement, government relations, and community engagement. Jen has led foundational work at CFY to develop an Integrated Youth Services (IYS) network across NL, building from the existing IYS site in St. John’s, NL, and working with 65+ community partners to build a model that is focused on both mental health and wrap-around service delivery for youth and young families in our province. Jen leads a team that is responsible for impact measurement, research, community partnerships, and public policy for CFY and the NL Integrated Youth Services network.
Jennie Martow is the program evaluator for The Grove Youth Wellness Hubs. Her work involves developing and implementing program evaluation methods for the skills and wellbeing programming in The Grove Hubs.
Jennie is also completing her M.A. in Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology at the University of Guelph and is a member of the Resilient Youth Research Group. Her research examines growth mindset, goal setting, and positive education with the aim of increasing youth flourishing.
Jennifer Wide (she/her) has been practicing as a consultant psychiatrist since completing training at the University of British Columbia, obtaining a Master of Science in Neuroscience (in the field of neurogenesis) followed by a medical degree, and more recently attaining a diplomate designation through the American Board of Addiction Medicine. She has a special interest in emotion regulation and trauma care. Her research interests include knowledge translation and implementation of therapeutic practices. In her spare time, she enjoys sampling culinary delights, traveling and spending time with her two littles.
Sheena Miao (she/her) is a psychologist registered with the College of Psychologists of British Columbia. She has extensive training and experience in the field of youth and adult mental health, obtaining her Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from the University of Victoria. Dr Miao has worked in various settings including hospital, community mental health, and private practice clinics, bringing a wealth of experience. Areas of expertise include CBT and DBT therapies. In her spare time you can find her cuddling with her puppy.
Sarah Adair (she/her) has lived on the west coast for 8 years. In that time she has delved into the world of public health and addiction research. She lead a substance use education and harm reduction program at Vancouver Island University where she completed her BSc. This work lead her to contribute to multiple studies related to substance use and led her to work with the BC Center on Substance Use. In her current role as a research coordinator with Foundry, Sarah has been involved in various projects which focus on youth mental health. Sarah has been volunteering with the Looking Glass foundation for 2 years, and has an interest in the resurgence of work being done with psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy.
Shreya (she/her) is a Youth Advisor with the Knowledge Institute on Child and Youth Mental Health and Addictions.
Katelyn is a suicide attempt survivor and mental health advocate. She has living and lived expertise with mental health concerns, the mental health system, foster care system, and beyond. Katelyn now works in research, knowledge translation, and knowledge mobilization, surrounding child and youth mental health. Katelyn also practices child, youth, and family Peer Support. Lived and living experience is Katelyn’s passion. She hopes this continues to inspire people to share their own lived experience and further push for it to be heard and integrated into the broader mental health system.
Dr. Alina Turner is Co-Founder and Co-President of HelpSeeker - a social technology and innovation Alberta-based B-Corp, founded in 2018. Her background is as a social scientist with a specialization in systems planning and integration, and as a funder and social policy expert. She’s had the opportunity to work in systems change efforts on homelessness and affordable housing, domestic violence, poverty, mental health, and addictions throughout her career. Alina’s drive and passion for her work are grounded in her lived experience of the social issues she continues to challenge in her professional work. She is a Fellow at The School of Public Policy, University of Calgary. Her most recent interest is in putting new technologies to use in reforming the design and delivery of social safety nets.
After experiencing first-hand the significant gaps in mental health services while attempting to provide appropriate supports for her son in life and at school, and ultimately losing her son to mental health, Leslie founded Myles Ahead. In memory of her son, Myles, Leslie brings over 20 years of research, evaluation, and management system experience in generating tangible, large-scale improvements through strategic program development, delivery, monitoring, evaluation, as well as policy advocacy in the environmental/energy conservation arena. By translating this expertise to Myles Ahead, Leslie is dedicated to creating a more cohesive and accessible support system for the mental wellness of children & youth in Canada, with the ultimate goal of mitigating child & youth suicide and making the world a kinder and more empathetic place for our kids.
Leslie believes in building partnerships to foster change, using an evaluative risk management lens to identify the gaps in the fragmented mental health care system to identify opportunities to improve services and mitigate potential risks… and that working together, we can create an inclusive culture based on compassion and empathy for everyone.
Nicole is Myles Ahead’s Director of Transformation, which leverages her mental health lived experience and diverse expertise as a permanent professional teacher, professional engineer, project management professional, change management practitioner, consultant, designer, and social entrepreneur. Nicole enjoys collaborating with diverse groups of people to co-create transformational solutions to complex problems, actualizing optimum outcomes for people, processes, technologies, and the planet. Her career experience spans many sectors, such as government, public, and private workplaces. She is very passionate about children, youths, and mental health, integrating decolonization, inclusion, diversity, equity, accessibility, anti-racism, antiviolence, and allyship perspectives and practices to disrupt systems, collaboratively and positively. In 2021, she led and co-facilitated Myles Ahead’s SafER Space and Myles to Mars initiatives.
Mahalia Dixon is a Youth Engagement Specialist at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health. Mahalia continuously seeks to advocate for the reality that the most effective and relevant research, policy, and service provision is centred around the needs and wants of those with lived experience.
Mardi Daley, B.A. is an advocate, facilitator and Peer Specialist working in youth mental health and homelessness in Toronto. Working from the lens of lived experience, Mardi collaborates on research projects to support by-youth for-youth resources, training and engagement. Her interests include youth employment, peer support and ethical youth engagement.
I began engaging with issues relating to social justice during my time as a coach for the Special Olympics Kincardine Division. This inspired me to volunteer with the Community Association for Riders with Disabilities, a Toronto-based organization that offers equine therapy. Seeing the progress individuals made over the seasons influenced my decision to continue my education and obtain my credentials as an Early Childhood Educator. Although I sincerely enjoyed working with young children, I found that mental health and neural development were my calling. I went on to obtain an Honours Bachelor of Child Development where I had the opportunity to conduct sociological research. Currently, I am enrolled in the Bachelor of Education program at York University within the Primary/Junior Division. Since beginning the program I co-created the Start Here, Start Now: 2SLGBTQQIA+ Teacher Candidate Workshop. I am also the Chair of the Youth Council for the Youth Homelessness Prevention and Housing Stabilization Strategy of the York Region. Through the Youth Strategy I was given the opportunity to lead the By Youth For Youth Project, which is aimed at informing homeless and/or at-risk youth of their tenancy rights. My goal is to use my experiences and education to help homeless and/or at-risk youth overcome challenges, so they can pursue their goals, as I have mine.
Sonia holds a Master’s in Economics and Business from Wilfrid Laurier. She is a national patient advocate with the Canadian Medical Association Patient Voice Committee.
In 2017, Sonia co-founded Body Brave, a charitable organization that offers treatment and support to people struggling with disordered eating and eating disorders. Over the pandemic, Body Brave responded to an exponential increase in demand and now serves nearly 2000 people per year, making it one of the largest community-based treatment programs in Canada.
Sonia’s passion for providing innovative, equitable mental health supports comes from her own experience with devastating eating disorder. In her late teens and early twenties, she navigated a complex healthcare system looking for help. She soon discovered that like herself, most people knew very little about eating disorders and the fact that they are prevalent, dangerous, brain-based illnesses.
Coming from a family of healthcare professionals, Sonia is deeply committed to working to improve the healthcare system. With her economics and business background, Sonia has a particular interest in innovative, e-health approaches that will drive systemic change in the mental health landscape. As a mixed person of colour, Sonia believes in the importance of exploring ways in which mental healthcare can become more accessible and equitable. She brings her passion and experiences of recovery to all of her work.
Shaleen Jones has been an advocate, organizer, educator, and all-round rabble rouser in the field of eating disorders for over twenty five years, holding leadership positions with community organization such as the BC Eating Disorders Association, Laing House, Peer Support Canada, and CMHA National.
Having overcome an eating disorder, she is passionate about recovery, the transformative power of peer support, and creating sustainable, systematic changes across the sector. Shaleen was one of the first people trained to provide peer support for those with eating disorders in Canada, and earned her Peer Support Certification from Peer Support Canada in 2015.
Shaleen was recognized with an Inspiring Lives Award from the Mental Health Foundation of Nova Scotia, and served on the Mental Health Advisory Council to the Federal Minister of Health. She is an active member of the Mental Health Commission of Canada’s Hallway Group, Quality Mental Health Care Network, and the E-Mental Health Collaborative. She is a founding member of Canada’s Body Peace Collaborative.
As the Executive Director for Eating Disorders NS Shaleen works to ensure that no-one in Nova Scotia has to face an eating disorder alone.
Jesse Vacarciuc is a Youth Worker at 360° Kids and at LOFT Community Services, but they wear many professional hats. They are a professional artist and musician, a Jack.org speaker, a person with lived experience in areas such as homelessness and addiction, a peer mentor to many youth in the community but most importantly, a young individual leading positive change. After leading and co-leading many activism based events, such as the “York Regional Police Youth Engagement Series” and “Operation : Break The Stigma”, they were awarded Youth Recognition in the framework of the Public Heroes Program. They have since developed, the Queer Agenda, a 2SLGBTQ+ centered program through the BYFY project in collaboration with CAMH to offer education and support to youth and professionals in the homeless and at-risk sector. They strive to bring more 2SLGBTQ+ initiatives to the community and contribute to the education and success of the individuals around them.
Marg Cox is Executive Director of the Haliburton County Youth Wellness Hub and Point in Time, Centre for Children, Youth and Parents. She has a passion for Collective Impact, youth, family and community engagement, service integration and anti-oppression, anti-racism and collaboration. Marg has participated and championed many change processes in order to address both determinants of health and improve service, through increased access and service integration and utilizes a “whatever it takes” approach.
Pam Weiss has been serving on the Board of Directors for Point in Time Centre for Children Youth and Parents for 5 years. Having lived experience with child, youth and adult mental health she advocates for the youth in her community with passion and sensitivity. Pam is a proponent of the Haliburton County Youth Wellness Hub, a strong voice on it's steering committee and has worked with several committees to ensure its realization. Pam continues to navigate her family’s mental health experience and remains diligent when advocating on their behalf.
Mary is the Manager of the Haliburton County Youth Wellness Hub and has worked with Point in Time, Centre For Children, Youth and Parents for 13 years. She has an education and background in anti-oppressive counselling and advocacy which has guided her in her work in the youth justice system, counselling and youth and community engagement. Mary is passionate about creating and sustaining space where youth can come as they are, share their voice freely and develop positive connections to their community.
Megan is an MSc in Health Services Research student at the University of Calgary. As an aspiring health services researcher, Megan is passionate about using patient-oriented research to improve health and mental health systems for young adults. She is motivated to create change in the way that youth-engaged research is conducted.
Zoya Punjwani is an MD/PhD student in Epidemiology at the University of Calgary. Across her diverse health research experiences, her passion is rooted in knowledge translation and bridging the gaps between benchside, bedside and community medicine. Her doctoral research will focus on assessing transition (pediatric to adult health care) readiness in youth with chronic health conditions.
Patreka Roach (she/her) is the Manager of Implementation for Youth Wellness Hubs of Ontario. A strategic and visionary leader, Patreka is dedicated to improving health and social wellbeing. She is a proponent of co-creating solutions for complex health care system issues using a client-centred, health equity approach. Patreka has led the planning and implementation of integrative care pathways to improve service delivery across the Ontario Mental Health and Substance Use sector. Over the past 10 years, Patreka has held various roles in community health, primary care, and clinical research. Patreka holds a Master of Public Health from the University of Liverpool, specializing in the Management of Health Systems. She enjoys travelling and discovering new coffee blends.
Mary Hanna (she/her) is the Project Manager for the Youth Wellness Hubs Ontario (YWHO) Evaluation Portfolio. She holds a Masters degree in Applied Social Research and a Bachelor of Science in Anthropology, from Laurentian University. Mary’s professional areas of interest and expertise include using data and data platforms to facilitate integrated service delivery and measurementbased cased care in the delivery of mental health services. Mary is passionate about approaches to evaluation and data collection that involve team collaboration and co-design with service providers and people who access services. In her spare time, Mary enjoys teaching Zumba and taking part in food and cultural experiences.
Kathryn Sadowski (she/her) is an Evaluator with Youth Wellness Hubs Ontario (YWHO). She completed a Master of Public Health degree from the University of Guelph and has worked in various planning and evaluation roles in public health across Ontario. She recently made the switch to youth mental health work with YWHO, where areas of interest include generating and using data to improve health equity and mental health outcomes for young people. She lives in Kitchener, Ontario, where she enjoys getting outside for walks with an interesting podcast, frequenting and discovering new coffee shops, and lots of yoga.
Raymond Johnson-Brown (they/them), Indigenous Wellness Coordinator. Guided by their lived experience in foster care and breaking the cycle of generations of mental health/addictions, Raymond strives to encourage conversations that centre collective wellness. Moving from the current model of doing for communities, Raymond pushes organizations to co-create with communities and actively apply two-eyed seeing to move forward in a good way. Raymond is currently in their fourth year of the Bachelors of Indigenous Social Work Program at Laurentian University.
Renée (she/her) has worked in health promotion and community-based mental health for the past 20 years. She is currently a Knowledge Broker with the Knowledge Institute on Child and Youth Mental Health and Addictions and works with a number of communities across the province to integrate youth and family voices in the design and delivery of mental health and substance use services and system planning.
Kelli is the Manager of Engagement at the Knowledge Institute on Child and Youth Mental Health and Addictions. Kelli oversees the youth and family engagement program including the Knowledge Institute's youth and family advisory councils and supports the implementation of the quality standards for youth engagement with agencies across the sector.
Sarah Oates is the Research Manager for Dr. Jo Henderson and Manager of the Youth Engagement Initiative (YEI), which operates out of the Margaret and Wallace McCain Centre at CAMH. Since graduating with her Master of Science in Psychology from Memorial University of Newfoundland in 2014, Sarah has been passionately involved in research and youth engagement. Sarah works alongside a team of research staff, managing Dr. Henderson's Youth Systems Innovation Group (YSIG) team, whose goal is to make systems change within the youth mental health and substance use sphere. Sarah also supports the YEI, which comprises a team of Youth Engagement Specialists, who are youth with lived/living experiences of mental health and substance use challenges, and a national Youth Advisor network of over 200 youth. The goal of the YEI is to facilitate collaboration between young people who have lived/living experience of mental health and/or substance use challenges and clinicians, researchers, and other decision-makers at CAMH and beyond.
Jacqueline Relihan is a Youth Engagement Specialist at CAMH. Jacqueline works alongside a team of young people with lived experience of mental health or substance use challenges to support decisions around service planning, policy development and research within CAMH and the community. As a young person with lived experience they are passionate about making a positive change to the current youth mental health system and truly believes there is much room to make it better then it currently is. They are a strong advocate for youth engagement in research and service planning and co-leads CAMH’s National Youth Action Council, which is a group of passionate young advocates from across Canada who provide feedback on projects related to mental health and substance use.
Sarah Wood is a youth peer engagement coordinator at FoundryBC. She is passionate about youth advocacy, and community development, and has been in the youth services field since she was 16. Growing up on Sylix Territory in the Okanagan, Sarah loves spending time in the outdoors and exploring all BC has to offer.
Michelle is a 25 year old writer, advocate, and content creator. She was born and raised on the traditional, ancestral, unceded territory of the Okanagan (Syilx) People and started her instagram/blog "BodyPosiPower" back in 2016. Since then, she's been featured in outlets such as the TODAY Show, Yahoo, The New York Post, and more. Michelle is also incredibly passionate about youth mental health advocacy work and lives with a learning disability.
Shannon (she/her) is a system change leader dedicated to creating people-centred teams, facilitating community partnerships, and creating transformative change to increase youth and community wellness in rural communities across Canada. Driven by a commitment to integrated care, diversity and inclusion, psychological safety, and the importance of including lived and living expertise, Shannon focuses on creating holistic people-centred care models. Having worked to enhance outcomes for children, youth, and their families in education for over 25 years, Shannon believes that working together with local, national, and international contexts is instrumental in creating shared purpose and evidence-based integrated care models in her own rural communities. Throughout her own mental health challenges and supporting those she cares for, she shamelessly advocates for mental health and substance use transformation on several local and provincial advisory boards, national mental health and substance use organizations and in her own organization: The Well Community Collective.
Stephanie Ens, Director, Clinical Service Innovation, Huddle Manitoba, United Way Winnipeg Stephanie holds a Masters of Social Work degree from the University of Manitoba with a research background focusing on the needs of Indigenous youth. For the past ten plus years, Stephanie has been a youth mental health clinician and coordinator at NorWest Co-op Community Health. Her practice has evolved from community-based social work to research and policy analysis work which became the impetus for the NorWest Youth Hub (the first Youth Hub in Manitoba), to her most recent position which is coordinating NorWest’s “Intervention and Outreach Team” (IOT), a team that supports youth with highly complex needs using evidence-based models such as Dialectical Behavioural Therapy (DBT) and Canadian High Fidelity Wraparound.
As a certified DBT therapist and a Wrap Canada coach and trainer, Stephanie is committed to blending the Wraparound approach with Indigenous cultural practices and works closely with NorWest team elder Ivy Chaske to ensure that this is done in a good way. In joining the MYHI Backbone Team, Stephanie will remain part of the NorWest clinical team – a strategy that will work well to connect the new hubs to NorWest’s significant clinical experience and innovative approaches, and to support the development of evidence-based
Stephanie holds a Masters of Social Work degree from the University of Manitoba with a research background focusing on the needs of Indigenous youth. For the past ten plus years, Stephanie has been a youth mental health clinician and coordinator at NorWest Co-op Community Health. Her practice has evolved from community-based social work to research and policy analysis work which became the impetus for the NorWest Youth Hub (the first Youth Hub in Manitoba), to her most recent position which is coordinating NorWest’s “Intervention and Outreach Team” (IOT), a team that supports youth with highly complex needs using evidence-based models such as Dialectical Behavioural Therapy (DBT) and Canadian High Fidelity Wraparound.
As a certified DBT therapist and a Wrap Canada coach and trainer, Stephanie is committed to blending the Wraparound approach with Indigenous cultural practices and works closely with NorWest team elder Ivy Chaske to ensure that this is done in a good way. In joining the MYHI Backbone Team, Stephanie will remain part of the NorWest clinical team – a strategy that will work well to connect the new hubs to NorWest’s significant clinical experience and innovative approaches, and to support the development of evidence-based pathways of MHA care for youth across the province
Ancestrally, I am a second-generation immigrant from Punjab (India), and a settler who was raised on the lands of the Syilx speaking nations. I live, love and play on Coast Salish nation lands. My background includes advocacy and awareness with South Asian Mental health, a Master’s in Public Health and experience co-leading initiatives and projects to design and support healthier communities. With Foundry I work alongside colleagues in addressing anti-racism at an organizational and network level, as well as supporting community development and expansion of Foundry.
(She/Her) Alicia Erenli currently lives on the unceded occupied lands of the q̓ic̓əy̓ (Katzie) First Nation and qʼʷa:n̓ƛʼən̓ (Kwantlen) First Nations with her family. Her journey includes advocacy and awareness of barriers of access for mental health and substance use services for Indigenous, Black and People of Colour, a Master’s in Counselling Psychology and supporting alongside her colleagues to address anti-racism at an organizational level. Her current work as Manager of Foundry Ridge Meadows and Youth Housing Program includes supporting and advocating for better access of supports for youth, young adults and their families. This is demonstrated in her leadership and passion around creating dialogue and brave spaces in ways that honour individuals’ experiences and open space for the difficult yet necessary conversations to happen.
Simone Maassen (she/her) studied and worked in Germany as a certified psychologist. She has over 25 years of experience working with children, youth and families in Germany, South Africa and Canada, and has also been involved in a number of research projects. Simone has been involved with Foundry Abbotsford and its partners from the very beginning. For the last 22 years she has worked with the Youth Resource Centre at Archway Community Services and is currently the Manager of Youth & Health Services
Charles-Albert helps raise awareness about mental illness; he works to reduce stigma and is actively involved in sharing his experience and his vision of a greatly improved health system. His work has been published several times in major Quebec dailies. He works as a peer helper and as a patient partner at the CIUSSS de l'Ouest-de-l'île-de- Montréal. He co-leads the Lift/Futur en tête Youth Experts Collective: a diverse community of youth with lived/living experience of mental health/substance use challenges who advise services and research designed to help youth pursue their education and work goals.
Vivian Kwan (she/her) is the Community Engagement and Partnership Lead at Kickstand. She holds a Bachelor of Science (2015) and a Master of Public Health (2021), and has worked in the public sector in various capacities in the past 6 years. She currently also serves as the Board Chair with the Centre for Race and Culture, Director of Marketing and Communications with the Emerging Health Leaders – Edmonton, and a member on the American Public Health Association Women’s Caucus Program Planning Committee. During her down time, she enjoys building her own wine subscription and spending quality time with friends over food.
Alex San Diego (she/they) is a Filipino-Canadian mental health advocate. She is the Communications Coordinator for Kickstand, working to transform how young people in Alberta access health and wellness services. They like to care for their mental health by listening to K-pop, participating in community outreach + organizing, and weightlifting!
Rachal Pattison (they/them) is the Service Innovation and Implementation Lead at Kickstand, in Edmonton, AB. As a registered occupational therapist (OT), they have worked with individuals living with chronic pain and as a mental health therapist supporting federally incarcerated women. Rachal also has a master's degree from the University of British Columbia, doing research in gender identity and mental health in young people. When they are not working on establishing integrated youth services in Alberta, they can be found reading fantasy novels, eating nachos and catering to the whims of their co-dependent cat.
Dan is currently an Engagement Specialist at Foundry. He is a passionate advocate, community creator and facilitator. He believes in the power of community and connection to help solve the biggest problems. Dan is especially interested in the connection between movement, nature and mental health. You can find Dan in the forest, eating or swimming when he isn't tackling the problems facing our healthcare system
Una Wright is the Founder of YouthSpeak Performance Charity, an organization inspired by personal experience within her own family related to mental health including the loss of two children. YouthSpeak provides leadership training to youth with personal experience related to mental health, bullying, racism and substance use to provide youth-led interactive assemblies and workshops for primary grades to post-secondary, parents, educators and other caring adults throughout the GTA and southern Ontario. Since its inception 20 years ago, YouthSpeak has reached over 350,000 with messages of hope, inclusivity, empathy and resilience.
Una’s passion and drive to support caring adults who care for youth also inspired her Self-Care Workshops as she has made it her personal mission to give a message of self-empowerment and to embrace their own story through coping strategies and a positive mindset.
Lauren Iuliani is a youth mental health advocate from Toronto, Canada. For the past several years, she has worked across initiatives pertaining to youth mental health, substance use, and homelessness within Canada and globally. Outside of her mental health endeavours, she works full time in the sustainable investing sector and holds both undergraduate and graduate degrees from Ivey Business School at the University of Western Ontario. Additionally, she volunteers in the international development and food justice sectors. In her spare time, Lauren enjoys cooking, tap dancing, and reading.
Stacie (she/her) completed an undergraduate degree in Kinesiology from Dalhousie University in 2020 and a professional degree in Education from the University of New Brunswick in 2022. She works at Partners for Youth as the Youth Mental Health Project Coordinator in Fredericton, NB. Recently, she was a Co-Chair of the Youth Advisory Council of the Youth Mental Health and Suicide Prevention Services Review conducted by the NB Child and Youth Advocate’s office. She is also Co-Executive Director of the Young Canadians Roundtable on Health, the founder of the Mental Health Student Support Network, a Groundbreaker with Frayme, and co-lead of the Mental Health International Youth Advisory Committee (G1G). She is passionate about school food, food insecurity, youth mental health, and youth engagement.
Jill Stringer (She/her) is a PhD Student living in Ontario researching student-athlete mental health. She holds a master's degree in Public Health with several years of experience working in the public health sector and with national non-profits. As a self-proclaimed life-long learner, Jill is driven to advocate for positive health system change that acknowledges and integrates lived expertise and other diverse forms of knowledge. She is most passionate about multidimensional health promotion through an understanding of programs, processes, and policies at the intersection of psychological, physical, and social wellbeing.
Anne Marie Portelli (she/her) graduated from the University of Guelph with a major in Child, Youth and Family and recently began her Master of Social Work at Wilfrid Laurier University. Her lived and living expertise are a huge 'why' in terms of why she is passionate about mental health and wellness - and creating a mental health and substance use system where youth can access the supports they need when they need it. There is so much stigma preventing youth from accessing support - and finding that support is difficult to begin with. Anne Marie is a Frayme Groundbreaker (and previous KMb fellow!), is a youth mentor within CMHA’s YouthTALK program, and is most importantly, grateful to share this space with all of you!
Monica Taing is a Medical Student at McGill University and Mental Health Advocate who strongly believes in making psychiatry accessible for everyone. She completed her Graduate Studies in Neuroscience at the University of Oxford, where her research focused on potential new treatments for Depression. In her spare time, she enjoys creating psychiatry and neurology podcasts and videos. Ultimately, her work is grounded in the desire to include and amplify the voices of youth with lived or living expertise.
Justin is a university student from Toronto, Ontario, passionate about youth mental health and substance education. Attending the University of Toronto, Justin advocates for hearing the voices of all youth equitably and equally. Justin has served on multiple committees involving youth mental health. These include the Digital Action Group run by CAMH, a team of youth leaders ensuring that digital spaces are safe and helpful to youth, and the Information and Privacy Commission's Youth Advisory Council. Justin is passionate about Knowledge Mobilization and is working on a Zine to promote Knowledge Equity in the youth mental health field.
Mishika is a third-year undergraduate student at Toronto Metropolitan University studying Geographic Analysis with a minor in public health. She has always been passionate about the intersection of health and technology. Her professional goals go alongside working within a tech-related public health industry. She plans to use various software within GIS and data analytics for epidemiological studies by tracking the sources of diseases and the movements of contagion agencies to identify conditions for at-risk populations and target intervention effectively. She is currently working within the Health Commons Solution Lab based within Mount Sinai Hospital as a Project Coordinator.
Julia Parrott is a psychotherapist currently working in PEI as a youth trauma therapist. She did her undergraduate degree at the University of Ottawa in Psychology and Economics where she completed her honours thesis which explored the relationship between fear of cancer recurrence, intolerance of uncertainty and quality of life. Julia then went on to complete her master’s in Counselling and Spirituality at Saint Paul University and published her thesis which used knowledge mobilization techniques to translate an in person social emotional learning program for children, into an online-live hybrid. Julia has a passion for clinical and research psychology spanning the health and trauma fields.
Yvonne is a Caregiver and Advocate Groundbreaker with lived experience in mental health. She is driven by the values of collaboration, creativity, equity, care, and authenticity. Over the past 8 years she has been working as peer researcher and mentor to youth and families/carers in health research. Her focus has been on policy, services design, training programs and meaningful partnerships. She uses human centered approaches to elevate and understand lived experience as a means to create better health care outcomes for all.
Registration for #Frayme2023 will provide access to live sessions, extracurriculars and networking/reception activities during the event and recordings of sessions* after the event concludes via the event shareback. The registration price is a flat rate regardless of whether you choose to attend the full event or just parts of it. Registration is tied to a specific person and cannot be shared amongst individuals or within organizations.
*Note that not all live/in-person sessions will be recorded
Frayme is committed to ensuring that youth and family members who are interested in attending but cannot afford the registration costs are supported through sponsorship. Frayme will review these on a case-by-case basis. If this includes you, please reach out to us.
Not sure if you’re part of the Frayme Network? Check this page to see if your organization is listed (psst, it’s easy to join if you aren’t - learn more about joining Frayme or if you are interested in becoming a Frayme Groundbreaker, learn more here.)
Frayme partner (early bird: December 2022- January 31st, 2023)
$300 + HST
Non-partner (early bird: December 2022- January 31st, 2023)
$350 + HST
Frayme partner (regular: January 31th, 2023- February 22th, 2023)
$350 + HST
Non-Frayme partner (January 31th, 2023- February 22th, 2023)
$380 + HST
Speaker/Facilitator discounted rate
$100 + HST
Groundbreaker
$20 + HST
GST/HST Registration #729061325
Frayme partner
$150 + HST
Non-partner
$180 + HST
Virtual Poster Presenter
$80 + HST
Groundbreaker
$20 + HST
GST/HST Registration #729061325
Please note that all times are in
Download Schedule: In-Person Virtual
Ten things trans and non-binary youth want researchers to know about gender: A case study of meaningful youth engagement in research co-design
CAMH
Enhancing Partnerships between Schools and Youth Hubs for Mental Health and Well-Being: OUR JOURNEY IN MOBILIZING COMMUNITIES
NorWest Co-op Community Health
Engaging youth in SCY-Well’s pilot proof-of-concept study: Exploring the essential ‘messiness’ of youth engagement in clinical mental health research
CAMH
Using Racial Caucusing to Support an Anti-Racist Workplace
Foundry BC
How YOUth can bring Integrated Youth Services to your communities: A toolkit for transforming the youth mental health and substance use system one hub at a time!
Frayme Groundbreaker
The Best We Have to Offer - Youth Suicide Prevention and Mental Health Services Review
NB Youth Advisory Committee for the NB Youth Mental Health and Suicide Prevention Services Review
10:30am - 11am 9:30am - 10am 7:30am - 8am
EXTRACURRICULAR 1: SOUND BATH MEDITATION
10:30am - 11am 9:30am - 10am 7:30am - 8am
EXTRACURRICULAR 3: RESTORATIVE STRETCHING CLASS
11am - 12pm 10am - 11am 8am - 9am
BREAKFAST | EXHIBITOR BOOTH VIEWING | POSTER VIEWING
11am - 12pm 10am - 11am 8am - 9am
BREAKFAST | EXHIBITOR BOOTH VIEWING | POSTER VIEWING
12pm - 1:30pm: 11am - 12:30pm: 9am - 10:30am: OPENING PLENARY (LIVESTREAM)
How to Build Collaboration Across Intersecting and Complex Issues
12pm - 1pm 11am - 12pm 9am - 10am
Presentation 1: Building Evidence for Peer Support: A Hybrid-Realist Participatory Evaluation
Presentation 2: Bridging the gap between youth voices and healthcare stakeholders: Using briefing notes as a knowledge translation tool
Presentation 1: Advancing a Youth Mental Health Apps Database in Canada
Presentation 2: Recovery for Everybody: Accessible eating disorders support across Canada
Presentation 1: The Magic of Community Design
Presentation 2: Co-Designing Youth Hubs – Myles Ahead!
1:30pm - 2pm 12:30pm - 1pm 10:30am - 11am
BREAK | EXHIBITOR BOOTH VIEWING | POSTER VIEWING
1pm - 2pm 12pm - 1pm 10am - 11am
Presentation 1: Skills Squad; an adapted DBT therapy for youth with cognitive challenges
Presentation 2: Huddle – Building a brand shaped by youth
Presentation 1: Storytelling Through Design 101
Presentation 2: Integrating Youth Generated Content into Digital Strategy to Foster Trust, Understanding, and Connection.
Presentation 1: How Can You(th) be Successful in Transitioning to Adult Care: Youth identified skills needed for patient navigator interventions.
Presentation 2: Mapping Youth & Natural Support Networks: Leveraging New Methods for Person-Centered Service Planning & Delivery
2pm - 3pm 1pm - 2pm 11am - 12pm
Presentation 1: Use the Strengths, Skills, and Goals Matrix for Engagement!
Presentation 2: Intersectional Engagement: the By-Youth-For-Youth (BYFY) project across contexts
Presentation 1: Getting Comfortable w/ the Uncomfortable: Indigenous Resurgence in a Colonized World
Presentation 2: Building An Equity Diversity Inclusions and Indigenous Reconciliation Framework
Presentation 1: Empathy and Compassion in the presence of Personal Discomfort: Applying a trauma-informed lens to dismantling substance use stigma
Presentation 2: Working with caregivers in your community: Adapt the “The Unofficial Survival Guide to parenting a young person with a substance use disorder”
2pm - 2:30pm 1pm - 1:30pm 11am - 11:30am
BREAK | EXHIBITOR BOOTH VIEWING | POSTER VIEWING
3pm - 4pm 2pm - 3pm 12pm - 1pm
Presentation 1: Giving Youth a Voice: Co-designing a Peer Support Digital Health Platform
Presentation 2: POV: how hard can it be to open a virtual clinic from scratch?
Presentation 1: It's taking a Village/County - The Power of Collaboration
Presentation 2: IYS Community of Practice: Community Engagement Re-Defined
Presentation 1: Erase the Shame: A Conversation around South Asian Youth Mental Health
Presentation 2: Huddle IYS - Culture as Intervention: The Role of a Backbone Team & Partners in Supporting Indigenous Programming
2:30pm - 3:30pm 1:30pm - 2:30pm 11:30am - 12:30pm
Presentation 1: CAMH’s Youth Engagement Initiative: How to build and co-design a sustainable network of youth with lived/living experience
Presentation 2: Taking a Youth-Centric Approach to Substance Use and Mental Health support
Presentation 1: Centering Youth Voices: How The Grove Youth Wellness Hubs Guelph Wellington Implements Evidence-Based Skills and Wellbeing Programming Across Urban and Rural Settings
Presentation 2: Engaging youth to develop a supported and employment and education program across Canada via Lift/Futur en tête
Presentation 1: Nothing For Us Without Us: Developing solutions with and for Equity Deserving Populations
Presentation 2: “From data to delivery”: Building Blocks for Enhancing Health Equity in Youth Mental Health and Substance Use Services.
4pm - 5pm 3pm - 4pm 1pm - 2pm
LUNCH BREAK | EXHIBITOR BOOTH VIEWING | POSTER VIEWING
3:30pm - 4:30pm 2:30pm - 3:30pm 12:30pm - 1:30pm
LUNCH BREAK | EXHIBITOR BOOTH VIEWING | POSTER VIEWING
5pm - 6pm 4pm - 5pm 2pm - 3pm
Presentation 1: Our big story: Implementing quality standards for engagement within integrated systems of care
Presentation 2: Go, Stop, Proceed With Care! Sharing Concrete Tools for Meaningful Youth Engagement
EXTRACURRICULAR 2
1-HOUR SESSION
Zumba Extracurricular
Presentation 1: The Story of Impact: Designing and Implementing a Youth-Centered Impact Measurement Strategy
Presentation 2: Collaboration from Coast, to Coast, to Coast: Partnership and Investment within the Sector
4:30pm - 5:30pm 3:30pm - 4:30pm 1:30pm - 2:30pm
Presentation: The Invisible Segment: Raising awareness about life in Indigenous remote communities
EXTRACURRICULAR 4
1-HOUR SESSION
MINDFULNESS MEDITATION
One Hour Workshop: Frayme's Knowledge Mobilization Fellowship Showcase
6pm - 6:30pm 5pm - 5:30pm 3pm - 3:30pm
BREAK | EXHIBITOR BOOTH VIEWING | POSTER VIEWING
Storytelling for Impact & System Transformation
6:30pm - 7:30pm 5:30pm - 6:30pm 3:30pm - 4:30pm
Presentation 1: Forward with hope: Supporting youth impacted by the Stigma of a Parent's Substance use
Presentation 2: Trauma & Covid-19: A polarized society unified by complex trauma
Presentation 1: Generating the Knowledge and Evidence Together
Presentation 2: Uncovering what mental health and recovery means to youth ages 12-15: A Deliberative Dialogue
Presentation 1: Building a Provincial Africentric Youth Engagement Strategy: The Black Youth Advisory Panel
Presentation 2: Journey towards Organizational Anti-Racism
9pm - 11pm: 8pm - 10pm: 6pm - 8pm: Evening Reception
Youth-friendly research methods and adaptations within a Delphi context: a youth engagement approach
CAMH
Engaging youth in the planning, design, and execution of a clinical trial: the YouthCan IMPACT study
CAMH
A Melanated Guide to Mental Health
Jesneet Brar
With, About and For: Engaging Youth Research Collaborators in Exploring Youth Mental Health in the Covid-19 Pandemic
University of Alberta
Co-creating communities of connection, belonging and hope through the National Campus Peer Support Pilot
Campus Peer Support
The Campus Assessment Tool: Improving Student Mental Health Through Collaboration and Research
Jack.org
It’s time to Be There for Youth Mental Health: How to get the knowledge, skills and confidence you need with the Be There Certificate
Jack.org
Secondary school staff confidence and worries about delivering mental health content
Jigsaw
Experiencing Hate on University Campuses: Online and Offline
Wilfrid Laurier University
Identifying and Supporting Community Mental Health, Service Needs, and Gaps in Care: The YWHO Equity & Youth Opportunities Fund
YWHO
The Co-Design Initiative: The Power of Lived Experience
THE CO-DESIGN INITIATIVE
UNDERSTANDING MENTAL HEALTH, STATISTICS, RESOURCES AND TIPS FOR YOUTH AND CAREGIVERS
YouthSpeak
Meaningful engagement that minimizes harms: youth and family perspectives
EENet YE/FE Community of Interest
12pm - 1:30pm: 11am - 12:30pm: 9am - 10:30am: OPENING PLENARY (LIVESTREAM)
12pm - 1pm 11am - 12pm 9am - 10am
Presentation 1: The Magic of Community Design
Presentation 2: Co-Designing Youth Hubs – Myles Ahead!
1:30pm - 2pm 12:30pm - 1pm 10:30am - 11am
VIRTUAL POSTER VIEWING AND VIRTUAL NETWORKING
1pm - 2pm 12pm - 1pm 10am - 11am
Presentation 1: How Can You(th) be Successful in Transitioning to Adult Care: Youth identified skills needed for patient navigator interventions.
Presentation 2: Mapping Youth & Natural Support Networks: Leveraging New Methods for Person-Centered Service Planning & Delivery
2pm - 3pm 1pm - 2pm 11am - 12pm
Presentation 1: Empathy and Compassion in the presence of Personal Discomfort: Applying a trauma-informed lens to dismantling substance use stigma
Presentation 2: Working with caregivers in your community: Adapt the “The Unofficial Survival Guide to parenting a young person with a substance use disorder”
2pm - 2:30pm 1pm - 1:30pm 11am - 1:30am
VIRTUAL POSTER VIEWING AND VIRTUAL NETWORKING
3pm - 4pm 2pm - 3pm 12pm - 1pm
Presentation 1: Erase the Shame: A Conversation around South Asian Youth Mental Health
Presentation 2: Huddle IYS - Culture as Intervention: The Role of a Backbone Team & Partners in Supporting Indigenous Programming
2:30pm - 3:30pm 1:30pm - 2:30pm 11:30am - 12:30pm
Presentation 1: Nothing For Us Without Us: Developing solutions with and for Equity Deserving Populations
Presentation 2: “From data to delivery”: Building Blocks for Enhancing Health Equity in Youth Mental Health and Substance Use Services.
4pm - 5pm 3pm - 4pm 1pm - 2pm
VIRTUAL NETWORKING RECEPTION HOSTED BY HABITUS UK
3:30pm - 4:30pm 2:30pm - 3:30pm 12:30pm - 1:30pm
VIRTUAL POSTER VIEWING AND VIRTUAL NETWORKING
5pm - 6pm 4pm - 5pm 2pm - 3pm
Presentation 1: The Story of Impact: Designing and Implementing a Youth-Centered Impact Measurement Strategy
Presentation 2: Collaboration from Coast, to Coast, to Coast: Partnership and Investment within the Sector
4:30pm - 5:30pm 3:30pm - 4:30pm 1:30pm - 2:30pm
Presentation: Frayme's Knowledge Mobilization Fellowship Showcase
6pm - 6:30pm 5pm - 5:30pm 3pm - 3:30pm
VIRTUAL POSTER VIEWING AND VIRTUAL NETWORKING
5:30pm - 7pm: 4:30pm - 6pm: 2:30pm - 4pm: Closing Plenary (LIVE STREAM)
6:30pm - 7:30pm 5:30pm - 6:30pm 3:30pm - 4:30pm
Presentation 1: Building a Provincial Africentric Youth Engagement Strategy: The Black Youth Advisory Panel
Presentation 2: Journey towards Organizational Anti-Racism
Five Young Adult Research Partners (YARP) have co-designed a tool to facilitate strengths-based youth engagement. Its original use was intended for research with youth, but has the potential to be adapted to any group project! This tool leverages simple open access technology, acknowledges the strengths that every person brings to the group, and creates opportunities for peer-to-peer learning. This tool creates the opportunity to engage people meaningfully in their work, decrease power dynamics between facilitators/researchers and people who hold lived experience, and increase more authentic co-design within projects. The research that this tool was originally developed for tells a story of what co-creation, authentic youth engagement, and lived experience can bring to a project. This research is still in preparation for submission. You will be getting a sneak peek before the research is published in full!
The By-Youth-For-Youth (BYFY) project began as a spinoff of the Housing Outreach Project-Collaborative (HOP-C) in 2017 as a way to engage youth who were transitioning away from homelessness in leadership development. The project was co-designed and meant to build informed tools for youth in similar situations. Although youth mental health and homelessness are often kept in separate silos, we found that across diverse geographic contexts, folks experiencing challenging patterns (eg. substance use) were able to create positive outcomes as youth leaders when building programming for others. We want to highlight 2 unique projects that took place in York Region, Ontario over the past year: the Queer Agenda (QA) and the Residential Tenancy Acts Video Series – all created by-youth, for-youth and supported by an experienced Peer Leader who led the initial pilot project, “MY” in 2017
A Two-part workshop:
The Haliburton County Youth Wellness Hub has co-created a model with youth, families, multiple service providers and an engaged broader community. From the location to the service delivery model, living experience and a community willingness to listen has resulted in support with services, financing, renovations, in kind programs and supports. It has been a collaborative effort and at the heart of the model is a universal door youth want to enter because its fun, accepting, creates a sense of belonging, connection to community and if needed an entry point to integrated services. We may know it as health promotion and prevention activities but what we have learned from youth, is that having a safe place to connect, engage and be themselves is what is needed most. Join this workshop to hear our story - the ups and downs of our journey and hopes for going forward.
Substance use stigma continues to be a well-known barrier to individuals accessing support and has been coined a public health issue by leaders across Canada. Despite efforts to decrease stigma, however, families experiencing substance use challenges continue to experience discrimination and isolation. This workshop will explore how we can dismantle substance use stigma by applying a traumainformed lens to relationships as service providers, community members, and families with lived experience.
Attend this workshop for practical tools to tailor a caregiver handbook to your community! To support parents of young people impacted by substance use, a group of parents from Victoria, BC, codesigned a local handbook with Foundry Central Office, Foundry Victoria and CCSA. Launched in 2021, “Parents like us: The Unofficial Survival Guide to parenting a young person with a substance use disorder” caught the attention of communities across Canada, including Sault Ste. Marie, the first community to adapt Parents Like Us.
Recognizing that not all communities have the resources to build a caregiver handbook from scratch, CCSA developed a toolkit to adapt Parents Like Us. Guided by family engagement best practices, the toolkit is a culmination of CCSA’s experiences working on the original handbook and supporting Sault Ste Marie’s adaptation.
Our workshop will guide attendees through the adaptation process and offer tools, resources, and considerations for successful community adaptation.
Kids Help Phone (KHP) builds scalable e-mental health solutions to ensure young people are able to access barrier-free supports 24/7. In 2021, amid the COVID-19 pandemic, KHP developed and launched Canada’s first national, free, digital Peer Community, developed with youth, for youth. A key aspect of this service was our approach to co-development with over 260 young participants and our ongoing youth engagement to evolve the platform to better meet service users. In this presentation, we will describe how co-design of e-mental health products can occur and why it is important. We will also provide impact data on the service since launching and discuss ongoing improvements being made to the service based on learnings.
How do you create a virtual waiting room with a welcoming, youth-friendly feel? How do you create virtual “warm-hand offs” between providers to ensure a young person has a seamless care experience when accessing integrated services online? How do you create a strong, collegial team environment for clinicians and providers who work virtually? These are questions that we have grappled with on our journey to launch our virtual integrated youth service clinic, Kickstand Connect. On the surface, it may seem like a reasonably straightforward challenge, to map a typically in-person service to an online and virtual setting; how hard can it be, right?! Come with us on the journey of building a virtual integrated youth service clinic from scratch as we explore challenges faced, relationships built, and lessons learned. Welcome to Kickstand Connect!
The Haliburton County Youth Wellness Hub has co-created a model with youth, families, multiple service providers and an engaged broader community. From the location to the service delivery model, living experience and a community willingness to listen has resulted in support with services, financing, renovations, in kind programs and supports. It has been a collaborative effort and at the heart of the model is a universal door youth want to enter because its fun, accepting, creates a sense of belonging, connection to community and if needed an entry point to integrated services. We may know it as health promotion and prevention activities but what we have learned from youth, is that having a safe place to connect, engage and be themselves is what is needed most. Join this workshop to hear our story - the ups and downs of our journey and hopes for going forward.
Across Canada, Integrated Youth Service (IYS) networks are expanding! Some are barely a community idea, many are gaining momentum, and others are bursting into emergence. Regardless of where your IYS network is on the implementation journey, one key factor necessary to ensure robust success and sustainability is fulsome community engagement with youth, family and social service providers. Genuine community engagement is critical and attainable when we carefully weave values of authentic co-design, transparency, collaboration and accountability throughout the development of an engagement strategy, increase our community’s capacity, provide culturally safe and equitable spaces, and commit to collaborative action.
As team members engage and share best practices for successful community engagement at all levels, The Grove and The Well will co-develop the beginnings of a Community of Practice for IYS Community Engagement to support the amplification of evidence-informed research and best-practice.
Mental Health is a highly stigmatized and suppressed topic in the South Asian community. This can lead to discrimination against those who experience it (Multani 2017), acting as a significant barrier to health seeking, diagnosis and treatment – further deepening the social marginalization surrounding mental health in the South Asian community. With an increasing population of South Asian Youth in Canada, it is important that the diverse voices and unique experiences of the population are heard. Through storytelling, youth can contribute towards de-stigmatization of mental health within their community. Health professionals and services can recognize these experiences and further tailor their services to specific cultural nuances and understandings.
Clinical innovation, the co-design of integrated service models and core services, is essential to the successful scaling and implementation of the pan-Canadian IYS model. Huddle is Manitoba's IYS initiative. This workshop – led by representatives of the Huddle initiative’s Clinical Innovation Working Group, the Transformation-Focused Huddle Backbone Team, and partners will present on work to date in supporting Indigenous programming as a core service and culture as intervention for Huddle sites. Examples of this in action at a site level will be highlighted alongside the rationale for including Indigenous programming as foundational. Manitoba is viewed on a national scale as a leader in Indigenous ways of knowing and healing. We believe this presentation will solidify that view and will assist initiatives across the country in their own efforts for Indigenous Truth and Reconciliation.
Quality engagement is about ensuring young people and families have an active role in service planning at the system level. To support this work, the Knowledge Institute on Child and Youth Mental Health and Addictions (the Knowledge Institute) collaborated with young people, families, researchers, and services providers to co-develop the quality standards for youth engagement (YE) and family engagement (FE). Incorporating research, practice and lived experience, these standards were co-created to support meaningful engagement and improve experiences for young people and families who are working to transform youth mental health and substance use (YMHSU) care systems. In this workshop, we will share our story of working with and within integrated systems of care to implement these quality standards. We will introduce tools we created to measure engagement efforts and guide evidence-informed decision-making and create space for participants to connect and learn about practical approaches.
The Knowledge Institute on Child and Youth Mental Health and Addictions supports Ontario’s CYMHA sector to improve and maintain meaningful engagement practices through its quality standards for youth engagement. These standards use tools that were co-developed with young people to support conversations and actions relating to meaningful engagement. In this workshop, we will share a resource that was developed to support the quality standard for youth engagement, called the YE Traffic Light. The resource provides a focus on supporting conversations with agency staff about how to move forward with meaningful engagement and the importance of being aware of engagement activities that can have a negative impact on young people. By sharing experiences of using this resource and applying the principles of the quality standard for youth engagement, our presenters will help our audience identify different levels of engagement and will leave them wanting to learn more about the quality standards.
Choices for Youth (CFY) provides wrap-around services through on-site clinical supports, housing services, family and natural supports and employment and education supports. Every day, we see the impact of supporting youth with their housing, employment, and family stability on positive health outcomes, but we didn’t have the data to prove it.
Over the past two years, we have worked with youth to develop and implement a new data system and a core intake process that centre their self-defined goals and help them monitor progress towards them. Additionally, we have built out a longitudinal data collection process which demonstrates that after 18 months of engagement, we are able to increase housing stability by 60% while decreasing emergency healthcare service use by 91% (as just one example). We are eager to share our key learnings with other agencies to support others who are interested in taking a similar approach to data collection.
An increased focus on and funder investment in research activities in the youth mental health and substance use (YMHSU) sector in Canada is a welcome step toward optimizations to a highly inefficient system. However, without the necessary oversight, inadvertent redundancies of efforts and investment is common. Furthered by fragmented funding of intermediary organizations with mandates to serve and transform at a system level, the YMHSU sector is compromised in its ability to project a cohesive future state of service. Frayme was created as a federally-funded organization with a mandate to reduce duplication through knowledge mobilization in the Canadian youth mental health and substance use sector. Focusing on youth mental health and substance use (YMHSU) care, specifically integrated youth mental health and substance use (iYMHSU) services, Frayme is a meta-network that connects networks and organizations working in youth services systems to accelerate the implementation of quality iYMHSU services. In the Canadian context, Frayme and its partners are already informing the rapid adoption of iYMHSU services. Frayme acts as a resource for health leaders with an interest in promoting integration between YMHSU services, leading-edge knowledge, and connections to other partners working to advance the field.
In this workshop, we will share our Forward Guide while engaging the audience in self-reflections that will support them in dismantling the substance use stigma which harms youth whose parents have a substance use disorder.
As each of us knows all too well, the world has been and continues to be shaken by the coronavirus. On a global scale, the world has been learning and trying to collectively survive something new, nerve-racking, and life-threatening. At the same time, segregation based on viewpoints and values began to emerge across the world, altering the ways that communities live and operate. Harnessing her lived, educational, and professional expertise, Micaela shares space with participants to dive into the societal impacts of covid-19, its consequence on individual and community wellness from a complex trauma perspective, and suggestions on how to move through our new world with wellness in mind.
The evolution of integrated and youth engaged service models is actually creating a new body of knowledge. From differing perspectives – youth, family members, peer support workers, programming, intake, admin., Mangers and Directors- we all have differing perspectives about what it takes. We would like to harvest the thoughts and ideas of participants to document required skills and knowledge, and engage the group in plans to move this forward into next steps by creating an ongoing virtual platform to document the emerging body of knowledge, continue to expand it and eventually explore ideas for dissemination. As we look at scaling models we need to find ways to build local capacity, especially in rural communities and would like to explore together how to do that.
Younger youth ages 12-15 often lack a voice in health care research and practice. Instead, parents/caregivers or service providers make decisions about their care, usually without input from the youth themselves. As such, there is little known about how youth understand their mental health and what their needs are for recovery. We use patient-oriented research methods in the stages of design, collection, analysis, interpretation, and dissemination to gather evidence on what is meaningful in the mental health journey of youth 12-15 through qualitative interviews. The resulting themes relate to connecting with others, nature, and themselves; doing things that they enjoy; and being in trusting, safe, and judgment-free environments. In this workshop, youth will facilitate deliberative dialogues on: Where would this information improve your service experience or programs aimed at youth? How can it be used to positively impact youth ages 12-15? And what knowledge mobilization is needed to get there?
Black youth continue to face systemic and community barriers when accessing mental health and substance use (MHSU) services. While there is ongoing movement to incorporate youth with lived/living experience into MHSU services and research, these efforts seldom center Black youth and their communities.
SAPACCY is a MHSU program for Black youth ages 12-29. Formed in 1994 as a community-based response to MHSU challenges for Black youth and their families, it is now situated out of CAMH. In 2021, SAPACCY received funding for a provincial expansion and it was quickly understood that the engagement of Black youth was essential to its ongoing success.
SAPACCY’s Black Youth Advisory Panel (BYAP) was formed in 2022 to amplify the voices and experiences of Black youth and advise on the ongoing expansion.
Our session will focus on the adaptations, recruitment and initial successes of the SAPACCY/BYAP collaboration and youth engagement strategy.
As a provincial network of Integrated Youth Services in BC, Foundry is addressing systemic barriers, such as racism, colonization and oppression. Youth and family wellness is impacted by racism in multiple ways including, access to care, feelings of worth, and implicit and explicit biases of care systems. Foundry is committed to changing the organizational culture in health care to realize better outcomes and safer experiences for Indigenous, Black and People of Colour (IBPOC) who access Foundry services, both virtually and in physical spaces. SInce 2020, Foundry has led a working group with youth and representatives from leadership across the network. This working group co-created an intentional antiracist organizational assessment tool with external consultants to pilot at the backbone organization and with two centres in the network. The assessment acts as a catalyst for change that expands anti-racist practice beyond the usual educational or quantitative practices.
Peer support involves social and/or emotional support offered from the perspective of an individual with lived experience of a mental health, social, or medical challenge and delivered by mutual agreement to a service user that shares similar challenges. Although there is a growing body of literature focused on youth peer support in mental health services, there continues to be a need to better understand what works for whom, why and in what circumstances. This presentation describes a hybrid realist and participatory evaluation of the LOFT peer support services for transitional aged youth (TAY). Findings lay the foundation for the development and scaling of evidence-based peer support. The TAY peer program represents a pioneering program having been established six years ago and expanding each year.
Using a briefing note as a knowledge translation tool allowed information to be moved directly from youth voices to healthcare stakeholders in a timely manner. This project demonstrates the importance of including patient voices in the development of dissemination materials for healthcare professionals. The transition from pediatric to adult care is a difficult time for youth with chronic health conditions, wherein youth report feeling overwhelmed and isolated. In collaboration with youth patient partners, we developed a briefing note with the goal of improving transition preparations for youth.
Five recommendations were identified:
This briefing note was disseminated directly to healthcare professionals working closely with youth who are transitioning to adult care.
Last year, RBC Future Launch and Wisdom2Action, alongside partners across the mental health sector, worked together to explore the feasibility of a Youth Mental Health Apps database in Canada. This app would act as a filtering mechanism for young people, allies, and caregivers and parents to assist young people in knowing which apps to use. This session will share findings from our engagement with stakeholders across the sector, providing attendees with a deeper understanding of Youth Mental Health Apps and key considerations pertaining to their use. As we move to the implementation stage of our initiative, this session will solicit insights from participants on how to implement a database that meets the needs of young people, families and service providers.
With session participants, we hope to explore one key question in particular: How can we meet young people where they’re at within a Youth Mental Health Apps Database?
Eating Disorders are a complex and common illness, with one in twelve impacted.
There are significant gaps in access to treatment, support, and other resources for recovery. We believe that everyone deserves access to supports for recovery, but how to make that possible in an equitable way across Canada?
Eating Disorders Nova Scotia and Body Brave have collaborated to create the Recovery Support Program, a welcoming virtual space that combines Peer Support with self-paced, evidence-based activities & resources.
Through a robust and secure e-platform, Canadians 14+ can access virtual, low-barrier programming – and support accessing higher levels of care as needed.
The insights from the evaluation of our work, as well as implementation guidelines, will be shared back to the system to demonstrate and provide guidance on Peer Support as a viable means to supporting the surge in eating disorders among youth in Canada.
It's hard to determine who said it first but the wisdom remains 'the people closest to the problem are the closest to the solution'. This presentation will highlight the impact that giving the power back to community can have. Requiring a significant shift in approach and mindset, trusting community with the design of their integrated youth services has been a hallmark of the Youth Hubs Alberta initiative. We have witnessed the power of honoring the knowledge in the place and culture of community and how those influences can create something that while still provincially aligned, are beyond what could have been imagined from the outside.
Youth hubs play an important protective, life-promoting role in supporting young people’s mental health. While the current landscape of youth hubs in operation includes pockets of excellence, their availability remains scarce in many regions across Canada. To help address this system gap, after confirming the value of creating a scalable framework with industry and community partners, Myles Ahead, Advancing Child & Youth Mental Health (Myles Ahead) partnered with a diverse group of youth to co-design a framework informed by a landscape assessment and global evidence-based, best-practice literature review. The youth hub framework, called Myles to Mars, will include a practical implementation and sustainment toolkit to support the proliferation of accessible youth hubs that are tailored with, and for, the communities they serve, across Canada.
Foundry Vancouver-Granville provides care to youth struggling with complex mental health challenges (trauma, addictions, multiple diagnoses). To add to the complexity, impaired cognition can be part of the picture, contributing to further social and emotional challenges. Previous group therapy developed for these socioemotional challenges rarely accounted for the needs of individuals with cognitive challenges. We aim to implement a therapy that helps youth to develop emotion and social skills considering their cognitive capacity. Specifically, an adaptation called the Skills System (Brown, 2011) was implemented. This program originated from Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT), a therapy designed initially for individuals with Borderline Personality Disorder and emotion regulation challenges. The Skills System teaches concepts of DBT in a way that is more suitable for individuals with developmental and intellectual disabilities (e.g., relatable language, visuals, real-life examples, repetition). We aim to explore the effectiveness of implementing this program to the youth population we serve.
In Manitoba, a common brand identity is a critical component of our Integrated Youth Services (IYS) model. By sharing a common name and visual identity, Huddle makes it easier for youth and families to find the help they’re looking for and to know what they can expect from each Huddle location. Over 100 youth from diverse Manitoba communities were involved in Huddle’s brand identity process. They informed its values and what these hubs should look and feel like. They brainstormed, drew and created alongside us, and then offered their feedback on the designs, helping us connect with them the way they want us to. This Workshop will help support other IYS initiatives across Canada with their brand identity work by offering lessons learned on peer facilitation, engaging diverse communities, creating inclusive and welcoming spaces, and breathing life into a brand.
In this introductory workshop, learn the fundamentals of using design to demonstrate impact and storytelling in order to capture the attention of your stakeholders and demographic furthering brand awareness and recognition in the sector. This workshop will review high impact design basics to evaluate everyday design projects and a framework for using design in the process of storytelling.
User-generated content is an integral part of Foundry’s digital strategy. We implement this by prioritizing young people’s voices and lived experiences throughout our digital strategy. Our youth and family advisors create content they are passionate about, find meaningful, and feel will draw their peers in to engage in our social channels. This form of content allows social channels to directly connect audiences peer to peer, increase engagement, and develop a more personal relationship with your users. We will be sharing the impact of Youth Generated Content on organizational awareness, and engagement. We hope that by presenting our work, participants will feel they can do the same and include their users directly in their digital strategies, especially youth and family-facing organizations.
The transition from pediatric to adult care can be challenging for youth with chronic health conditions and can contribute to a range of adverse health outcomes. The Transition Navigator Trial (TNT) is a randomized control trial, in which half of participants receive a patient navigator, whose goal is to assist with this transition. 48 youth/caregivers were interviewed at baseline. Participants were asked about their perspectives on the upcoming transition and how working with the navigator may assist with the transfer to adult-oriented services. It has been highlighted in the literature that health knowledge, selfadvocacy, and self-management skills promote a successful transition, however, a gap exists in what youth prioritize as those skills have been collected through other stakeholders. The findings of the qualitative arm of TNT demonstrate that youth emphasize their need and desire for assistance with skill development.
As systems planners/service providers, our primary interest is ensuring the needs of vulnerable communities are met. Effectively harnessing community resources & external partners is essential - but it’s no easy task. Doing so requires in-depth knowledge of youth networks and family systems, and an understanding of the strengths and assets available in relation to the formal social safety net. Recent technology advancements provide new methods for mapping support structures, offering powerful insights into what services are needed and where, while connecting people with resources. We'll explore the possibilities offered by these innovative approaches and examine ways to use them to foster stronger natural supports for youth.
“Nothing about us without us” has been an important theme for CAMH’s Youth Engagement Initiative (YEI), which seeks to facilitate youth engagement in the design and implementation of relevant and meaningful youth-oriented research, education and services projects. In 2014, two youth with lived/living experience were hired as YEI team staff; currently the YEI employs 10 Youth Engagement Specialists (YES’s). Our team of YESs lead and organize our network of over 200 youth advisors across Canada to consult on youth-related projects both internal and external to CAMH. In this workshop, we will inform attendees about: 1) how we got here, 2) our structural/organizational components that facilitate engagement activities, and, briefly, 3) how we currently manage requests for youth engagement. We hope our work will inspire organizations to grow their capacity for meaningful youth engagement.
Wellbeing is built by creating a community of inclusion and involving staff and youth from the beginning, exploring new options and understanding that the unique perspectives and differences of each part add value to the whole. Bringing an Integrated Youth Services (IYS) approach into action through Stepped Care 2.0 (SC2.0) principles puts youth at the centre of designing a system of support that works for them. Built on co-design, infusing a one at a time approach and understanding culture as an intervention has created an environment that supports wellbeing among the entire community involved with Huddle Broadway. Join us for an interactive experience that includes the voices of those who participated in the experience.
Skills and Wellbeing Programming and drop-in are often the first point of entry into the hub. It provides an opportunity for youth to learn and explore the variety of mental health, substance use, and supportive services available to them.
From the very beginning, The Grove Wellington Guelph has been committed to creating programming by youth for youth. Youth voices are centered through robust program evaluation and data gathering. We use applied research methods to learn more about the lived experiences of the youth attending our programming and use this feedback to inform future programming decisions. We utilize multiple data sources including program attendance, informally speaking with youth about programming, and formal feedback collection through short surveys from youth and facilitators. Our service partners are integral to this process and provide knowledge and expertise in designing welcoming activities and workshops that build skills and provide a safe space to build community.
Gather around for a bonfireside chat on how our pan-Canadian Youth Experts Collective has collaborated with partners across present-day Canada exploring an innovative way to support youth with their dreams around work and education. Lift/Futur en tête is a collaboration of ACCESS Open Minds, Foundry, and Youth Wellness Hubs Ontario through which twelve partner community-based Integrated Youth Services (IYS) have been implementing the evidence-based Individual Placement and Support (IPS) model for supported education/employment. IPS specialists work within IYS to help youth who are interested in working or advancing their education to pursue their goals if they are experiencing barriers. Our lead Youth Engagement Specialists want to talk about how youth have collaborated with services implementing IPS while responding to each community’s context. During a period of upheaval for youth, services, schools, and employers, we have been engaged in each stage of this complex national initiative.
Equity matters for mental health. Yet, young people from equity deserving groups, including, Indigenous (First Nations, Inuit and Métis), Black and Newcomer, often face disparities in access and quality of care. Using storytelling, data, and practical examples, Kids Help Phone will share how we have worked in partnership with equity deserving groups toward ensuring youth from these groups have equal and equitable access to our e-mental health supports. Through this presentation, KHP will provide an overview of how, as an ally organization, we established Advisory Councils and conduct ongoing community engagement across Canada with Indigenous, Black and Newcomer communities. We will also highlight how this engagement led to the development of distinct actions plans with concrete deliverables and measurements. Finally, we will detail how this approach has fundamentally changed the way we work at KHP and led to new strategy, programs and specific, culturally informed services.
The overarching goal of the Youth Wellness Hubs of Ontario (YWHO) model is to improve access and service standards for young people through an integrated approach to youth mental health and substance use services. YWHO’s values aim to ensure access, equity, and inclusion for diverse youth age 12 to 25.
Through the collection and analysis of socio-demographic data, we can identify disparities in access, quality of care, experiences and outcomes for different groups of youth. To support with using this data in a meaningful way, we will explore enhancing hub supports through the implementation of a multi-year Health Equity Service Blueprint. The Blueprint uses the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI), Achieving Health Equity: A Guide for Health Care Organizations, a five-component framework, which builds upon training, quality improvement and knowledge mobilization to move evidence to action. Data trends will be used to develop concrete actions to improve programs and services.
The Ballantyne Project is raising awareness about the unique challenges and barriers faced by youth and young adults living in remote Indigenous communities in Canada through the personal life experiences of Dwight Ballantyne who grew up in a remote First Nation until the age of 21. They are also letting youth and young adults living in remote Indigenous communities that they are no longer an invisible segment of our society through the #WeSeeYou campaign
It is critical to include persons with lived expertise (PWLE) as partners in the design, planning, implementation, and evaluation of mental health and substance use services and supports. At Frayme, we ground our approach to engagement in capacity building and allyship. To this end, Frayme developed and implemented a Knowledge Mobilization Fellowship (KMb) program. This program aimed to support youth, caregivers, and advocates from our Groundbreakers network in building a fundamental understanding of knowledge mobilization as a concept and in practice.
Substance use stigma continues to be a well-known barrier to individuals accessing support and has been coined a public health issue by leaders across Canada. Despite efforts to decrease stigma, however, families experiencing substance use challenges continue to experience discrimination and isolation. This workshop will explore how we can dismantle substance use stigma by applying a traumainformed lens to relationships as service providers, community members, and families with lived experience.
Attend this workshop for practical tools to tailor a caregiver handbook to your community! To support parents of young people impacted by substance use, a group of parents from Victoria, BC, codesigned a local handbook with Foundry Central Office, Foundry Victoria and CCSA. Launched in 2021, “Parents like us: The Unofficial Survival Guide to parenting a young person with a substance use disorder” caught the attention of communities across Canada, including Sault Ste. Marie, the first community to adapt Parents Like Us.
Recognizing that not all communities have the resources to build a caregiver handbook from scratch, CCSA developed a toolkit to adapt Parents Like Us. Guided by family engagement best practices, the toolkit is a culmination of CCSA’s experiences working on the original handbook and supporting Sault Ste Marie’s adaptation.
Our workshop will guide attendees through the adaptation process and offer tools, resources, and considerations for successful community adaptation.
Mental Health is a highly stigmatized and suppressed topic in the South Asian community. This can lead to discrimination against those who experience it (Multani 2017), acting as a significant barrier to health seeking, diagnosis and treatment – further deepening the social marginalization surrounding mental health in the South Asian community. With an increasing population of South Asian Youth in Canada, it is important that the diverse voices and unique experiences of the population are heard. Through storytelling, youth can contribute towards de-stigmatization of mental health within their community. Health professionals and services can recognize these experiences and further tailor their services to specific cultural nuances and understandings.
Clinical innovation, the co-design of integrated service models and core services, is essential to the successful scaling and implementation of the pan-Canadian IYS model. Huddle is Manitoba's IYS initiative. This workshop – led by representatives of the Huddle initiative’s Clinical Innovation Working Group, the Transformation-Focused Huddle Backbone Team, and partners will present on work to date in supporting Indigenous programming as a core service and culture as intervention for Huddle sites. Examples of this in action at a site level will be highlighted alongside the rationale for including Indigenous programming as foundational. Manitoba is viewed on a national scale as a leader in Indigenous ways of knowing and healing. We believe this presentation will solidify that view and will assist initiatives across the country in their own efforts for Indigenous Truth and Reconciliation.
Choices for Youth (CFY) provides wrap-around services through on-site clinical supports, housing services, family and natural supports and employment and education supports. Every day, we see the impact of supporting youth with their housing, employment, and family stability on positive health outcomes, but we didn’t have the data to prove it.
Over the past two years, we have worked with youth to develop and implement a new data system and a core intake process that centre their self-defined goals and help them monitor progress towards them. Additionally, we have built out a longitudinal data collection process which demonstrates that after 18 months of engagement, we are able to increase housing stability by 60% while decreasing emergency healthcare service use by 91% (as just one example). We are eager to share our key learnings with other agencies to support others who are interested in taking a similar approach to data collection.
An increased focus on and funder investment in research activities in the youth mental health and substance use (YMHSU) sector in Canada is a welcome step toward optimizations to a highly inefficient system. However, without the necessary oversight, inadvertent redundancies of efforts and investment is common. Furthered by fragmented funding of intermediary organizations with mandates to serve and transform at a system level, the YMHSU sector is compromised in its ability to project a cohesive future state of service. Frayme was created as a federally-funded organization with a mandate to reduce duplication through knowledge mobilization in the Canadian youth mental health and substance use sector. Focusing on youth mental health and substance use (YMHSU) care, specifically integrated youth mental health and substance use (iYMHSU) services, Frayme is a meta-network that connects networks and organizations working in youth services systems to accelerate the implementation of quality iYMHSU services. In the Canadian context, Frayme and its partners are already informing the rapid adoption of iYMHSU services. Frayme acts as a resource for health leaders with an interest in promoting integration between YMHSU services, leading-edge knowledge, and connections to other partners working to advance the field.
Black youth continue to face systemic and community barriers when accessing mental health and substance use (MHSU) services. While there is ongoing movement to incorporate youth with lived/living experience into MHSU services and research, these efforts seldom center Black youth and their communities.
SAPACCY is a MHSU program for Black youth ages 12-29. Formed in 1994 as a community-based response to MHSU challenges for Black youth and their families, it is now situated out of CAMH. In 2021, SAPACCY received funding for a provincial expansion and it was quickly understood that the engagement of Black youth was essential to its ongoing success.
SAPACCY’s Black Youth Advisory Panel (BYAP) was formed in 2022 to amplify the voices and experiences of Black youth and advise on the ongoing expansion. Our session will focus on the adaptations, recruitment and initial successes of the SAPACCY/BYAP collaboration and youth engagement strategy.
As a provincial network of Integrated Youth Services in BC, Foundry is addressing systemic barriers, such as racism, colonization and oppression. Youth and family wellness is impacted by racism in multiple ways including, access to care, feelings of worth, and implicit and explicit biases of care systems. Foundry is committed to changing the organizational culture in health care to realize better outcomes and safer experiences for Indigenous, Black and People of Colour (IBPOC) who access Foundry services, both virtually and in physical spaces. SInce 2020, Foundry has led a working group with youth and representatives from leadership across the network. This working group co-created an intentional antiracist organizational assessment tool with external consultants to pilot at the backbone organization and with two centres in the network. The assessment acts as a catalyst for change that expands anti-racist practice beyond the usual educational or quantitative practices.
It's hard to determine who said it first but the wisdom remains 'the people closest to the problem are the closest to the solution'. This presentation will highlight the impact that giving the power back to community can have. Requiring a significant shift in approach and mindset, trusting community with the design of their integrated youth services has been a hallmark of the Youth Hubs Alberta initiative. We have witnessed the power of honoring the knowledge in the place and culture of community and how those influences can create something that while still provincially aligned, are beyond what could have been imagined from the outside.
Youth hubs play an important protective, life-promoting role in supporting young people’s mental health. While the current landscape of youth hubs in operation includes pockets of excellence, their availability remains scarce in many regions across Canada. To help address this system gap, after confirming the value of creating a scalable framework with industry and community partners, Myles Ahead, Advancing Child & Youth Mental Health (Myles Ahead) partnered with a diverse group of youth to co-design a framework informed by a landscape assessment and global evidence-based, best-practice literature review. The youth hub framework, called Myles to Mars, will include a practical implementation and sustainment toolkit to support the proliferation of accessible youth hubs that are tailored with, and for, the communities they serve, across Canada."
The transition from pediatric to adult care can be challenging for youth with chronic health conditions and can contribute to a range of adverse health outcomes. The Transition Navigator Trial (TNT) is a randomized control trial, in which half of participants receive a patient navigator, whose goal is to assist with this transition. 48 youth/caregivers were interviewed at baseline. Participants were asked about their perspectives on the upcoming transition and how working with the navigator may assist with the transfer to adult-oriented services. It has been highlighted in the literature that health knowledge, selfadvocacy, and self-management skills promote a successful transition, however, a gap exists in what youth prioritize as those skills have been collected through other stakeholders. The findings of the qualitative arm of TNT demonstrate that youth emphasize their need and desire for assistance with skill development.
As systems planners/service providers, our primary interest is ensuring the needs of vulnerable communities are met. Effectively harnessing community resources & external partners is essential - but it’s no easy task. Doing so requires in-depth knowledge of youth networks and family systems, and an understanding of the strengths and assets available in relation to the formal social safety net. Recent technology advancements provide new methods for mapping support structures, offering powerful insights into what services are needed and where, while connecting people with resources. We'll explore the possibilities offered by these innovative approaches and examine ways to use them to foster stronger natural supports for youth."
Equity matters for mental health. Yet, young people from equity deserving groups, including, Indigenous (First Nations, Inuit and Métis), Black and Newcomer, often face disparities in access and quality of care. Using storytelling, data, and practical examples, Kids Help Phone will share how we have worked in partnership with equity deserving groups toward ensuring youth from these groups have equal and equitable access to our e-mental health supports. Through this presentation, KHP will provide an overview of how, as an ally organization, we established Advisory Councils and conduct ongoing community engagement across Canada with Indigenous, Black and Newcomer communities. We will also highlight how this engagement led to the development of distinct actions plans with concrete deliverables and measurements. Finally, we will detail how this approach has fundamentally changed the way we work at KHP and led to new strategy, programs and specific, culturally informed services.
The overarching goal of the Youth Wellness Hubs of Ontario (YWHO) model is to improve access and service standards for young people through an integrated approach to youth mental health and substance use services. YWHO’s values aim to ensure access, equity, and inclusion for diverse youth age 12 to 25.
Through the collection and analysis of socio-demographic data, we can identify disparities in access, quality of care, experiences and outcomes for different groups of youth. To support with using this data in a meaningful way, we will explore enhancing hub supports through the implementation of a multi-year Health Equity Service Blueprint. The Blueprint uses the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI), Achieving Health Equity: A Guide for Health Care Organizations, a five-component framework, which builds upon training, quality improvement and knowledge mobilization to move evidence to action. Data trends will be used to develop concrete actions to improve programs and services.
It is critical to include persons with lived expertise (PWLE) as partners in the design, planning, implementation, and evaluation of mental health and substance use services and supports. At Frayme, we ground our approach to engagement in capacity building and allyship. To this end, Frayme developed and implemented a Knowledge Mobilization Fellowship (KMb) program. This program aimed to support youth, caregivers, and advocates from our Groundbreakers network in building a fundamental understanding of knowledge mobilization as a concept and in practice.
Stay with us!
A hotel room block for the Frayme Learning Institute 2023 has been secured at the Hyatt Regency Vancouver at a special rate of $249 CAD/night (plus applicable taxes and fees).
The room block closes on Friday, February 10, 2023. In order to book a room within the Frayme room block and take advantage of our group rate, you MUST book by this date.
Booking Your Hotel Accommodation
To book your hotel accommodations at the Hyatt Regency Vancouver, please click HERE. Room block rates are subject to availability. The Frayme room block will close on Friday, February 3, 2023.
If you wish to make your reservation by phone, you can do so by calling 1-888-421-1442, available 24/7. When calling, please reference the Frayme Learning Institute in Vancouver in February 2023.
Hotel Cancellation Policy
Hotel reservations made in the Frayme block at the Hyatt Regency Vancouver can be cancelled up to 48 hours in advance of your arrival date. Cancellations within 48 hours of arrival will be subject to charges.
Ground Transportation
To / From Vancouver International Airport
Canada Line:
The Canada Line connects Vancouver International Airport to downtown Vancouver in under 30 minutes. Take the train to the Vancouver City Centre station, exit onto Georgia Street and take a left, we are located two short blocks away at 655 Burrard Street. Please visit www.translink.ca for more information.
Taxi:
Taxis are available from the Airport to the hotel at a flat fare of $35 plus tip. Taxis to the Airport from the hotel are at the metered rate, approximately $35 - $45 plus tip.
Around the City
Skytrain:
This fast and effective transportation system will get you to your destination quickly and easily. The Burrard Station is located across the street from Hyatt Regency Vancouver. Single trip and Day Passes are available.
Parking
The Hyatt Regency Vancouver offers underground parking with a clearance of six feet for a rate or $41.66 CAD/day inclusive of taxes. Parking charges include in / out privileges. If you are bringing a vehicle with a higher clearance, please contact the hotel concierge at 604-683-1234 for additional parking options.
Hotel & Travel Support
If you are experiencing any issues with booking accommodations, please contact the Frayme Learning Institute 2023 Event Support Team at info@lomaagency.com or by phone at 1-877-322-4130 (Hours of Operation: Monday to Friday, 8:00 am – 6:00 pm EST).
For more information about the hotel, please visit their website here.
Recommended Travel Dates
It is recommended that participants arrive by the evening of Tuesday, February 21, 2023 to ensure you don’t miss any programming.
We recommend departing no earlier than 7:00 p.m. on Thursday, February 23, 2023 to ensure that you leave ample time to travel to the airport without missing any Learning Institute programming.
All are welcome to attend the Frayme Learning Institute, however #Frayme2023 will be most relevant to organizations/individuals that play a role in the delivery of YMHSU systems and services including (but not limited to):
Three types of programming will be offered at the 2023 Learning Institute: in-person workshop, and poster presentations (in-person and virtual).
In-person Workshop (approximately 25-30 minutes in length per workshop): In-person workshops will feature presentations by one or more speakers and should include the audience through interactivity. These should focus on sharing lessons learned, key takeaways or specific learnings from a project that are transferable to other programs and initiatives. Workshops should also engage the audience through conversations, questions and dialogue. Presenters are also encouraged to indicate if they are open to collaborating or exchanging knowledge with others and specifically articulate how peers can reach out to express interest. Space should be reserved after each presentation for questions and comments from participants.
In-person and Virtual Poster Presentations: Poster Presentations will combine traditional posters from presenters with a twist! We encourage every submission to think about how they can engage participants in a meaningful way while they review your poster and incorporate elements of storytelling to showcase data and findings. Dedicated time will be made available during the Learning Institute breaks to allow for posters to shine, while a virtual platform will allow attendees who are remote to still engage with and view posters from the comfort of home.
All submissions to the 2023 Learning Institute will be delivered either virtually or in-person. Please check the list below to ensure your submission fits the all required criteria:
Each workshop must be no longer than 30 minutes in length and include time for questions and comments from the audience.
Submissions must relate to youth mental health and/or substance use and addictions services, supports and/or programs operating in Canada. Content around international youth mental health and/or substance use and addictions services, supports and/or programs will be considered on a case-by-case basis.
Workshop submissions must include the input and expertise of either youth and/or caregivers, either in the delivery of the workshop itself or in the work of the project being highlighted within the workshop. Frayme seeks to amplify youth and caregiver voices to increase knowledge equity throughout the YMHSU system.
Selections will be based on the following criteria:
Submissions are due by midnight Eastern Time on December 15, 2022. Applicants will be notified shortly thereafter whether their submission has been accepted.
Need help drafting your submission? Frayme is committed to ensuring equity and accessibility within all of our work. As such, we will be offering allyship to develop capacity and provide helpful tips and tricks on submitting a project or drafting an abstract for conferences to ensure that all of our stakeholders have the support they need in this process. Please do not hesitate to reach out to our Knowledge Equity Team if you require support for your submission.
Abstract Submissions are now closed. If you have any questions, please contact us below:
Check out this page to learn and see what went down last year at the Learning Institute to get a taste of what to expect or you can download the official #Frayme2023 brochure.
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Network partners work alongside Frayme or other network partners in order to transform youth mental health and substance use services in Canada. Access the evidence, resources and tools you need to take action.