Pillar 15

A Preferred Collaborative Partner

We can achieve much more together than we can individually. This applies to employees, as well as other organizations and agencies in the mental health space. As such, we work hard to cultivate and maintain strong partnerships that create efficiency in service delivery and expand our reach (and our partners’ reach) to our community and region. This year, we continued our partnership with Community Connect YYC to provide barrier-free access to book our Counselling services, and moved forward with a partnership with The Alex through our School of Peer Support.

Pillar 15

A Preferred Collaborative Partner

We can achieve much more together than we can individually. This applies to employees, as well as other organizations and agencies in the mental health space. As such, we work hard to cultivate and maintain strong partnerships that create efficiency in service delivery and expand our reach (and our partners’ reach) to our community and region. This year, we continued our partnership with Community Connect YYC to provide barrier-free access to book our Counselling services, and moved forward with a partnership with The Alex through our School of Peer Support.

 

“We partner with other organizations that we can work with synergistically and in complement. We are very mindful, just as I know CMHA Calgary is as well, we don’t ever want to duplicate. We just need to communicate and collaborate so we can we can make sure our community members have all the services that they need.”

– Jennifer Eyford (Associate Director, Mental Health, Addictions & Outreach at The Alex)

In the past year, our Counselling Team provided

569

Different services to
clients over 412.7 hours

33

Drop-in Suicide Bereavement
sessions for 129 clients

“Community Connect YYC is a collaborative of Calgary affordable counselling agencies. CMHA Calgary was one of the organizations that partnered with us on that initial needs assessment…(and) was part of all of those conversations and really committed to the vision of what we were trying to achieve: that it should be easier to get the help you need when you need it.” – Vanessa McConnell (Director, Family Mental Health & Social Inclusion at Kindred (formerly Catholic Family Service)

“We really value our partnership that we have with The Alex. They’ve accepted our emerging peers into their workplace to help them develop their own skills…I also feel that our partners have really strengthened the peer support profession by recognizing and demonstrating the power of Peer Support in practice – how it differs from that clinical lens, and the significant impact that it can have on a client’s mental health journey.” – Michelle Wagner (Director, Operations – Community Mental Health & Wellness)

Over the past year, CMHA Calgary has partnered with the following organizations to provide School of Peer Support practicums:

  • The Alex
  • The Distress Centre
  • Shift Calgary
  • The Pregnancy and Infant Loss Centre
  • Street Cats YYC

Our School of Peer Support expects to graduate 30 students in 2022!