Two St. Albert community agencies are partnering to further address youth suicide and youth mental health with the help of a $125,000 yearly provincial grant.
One of the agencies, St. Albert Food Bank and Community Village, plans to use its portion of the funding — $95,000 — to hire a youth suicide prevention co-ordinator who will work with school boards and service agencies such as Stop Abuse in Families (SAiF). The funding is guaranteed for the next two years.
"Working together, we can offer a multifaceted approach to youth suicide prevention through a combination of responsive services, awareness efforts, and education initiatives," Suzan Krecsy, the executive director of St. Albert Food Bank and Community Village, said in an email.
"This project is broken down into two focus areas that complement one another," she said. The first area of focus will be the responsibility of the new co-ordinator.
"The co-ordinator will focus on supporting projects that reduce social stigma of mental-health problems and illness, promote mental well-being, and encourage help-seeking behaviours," said Krecsy.
"The [co-ordinator] will also focus on building community capacity by creating youth-specific print and digital resources that can be utilized by youth-serving agencies and schools to promote youth mental health and highlight where youth and families can go for help when needed."
Krecsy said the co-ordinator position hasn't been filled yet, but the hiring process is underway. Supports will begin once the position is filled.
Each group will essentially work with the co-ordinator, who will refer community members to the different services.
The project is also supported by Outloud, St. Albert Family Resource Centre, City of St. Albert Family and Community Support Services, St. Albert Public School Board, and the Greater St. Albert Catholic School District.
SAiF youth counselling
The second area of focus, and the other partner organization for this project, is SAiF.
SAiF's portion of the grant funding — $30,000 — will allow the organization to expand its youth counselling services, Krecsy said. "The goal is to assist more youth by providing evidence-based and strength-based counselling for youth not deemed an immediate risk of harm to themselves but who express suicidal ideation as a result of family violence or bullying trauma.
"This counselling program can provide timely, localized services for rural and smaller communities within SAIF’s service areas, including a significant Indigenous population and under-served 2SLGBTQ+ youth who often come to St. Albert from their rural communities to access services."
Areni Kelleppan, the executive director of SAiF, said her organization's role in the project is to make sure youth who are deemed at-risk have somewhere to access services quickly. The co-ordinator will be able to refer youth to SAiF's services directly, Kelleppan said.
"If [the co-ordinator] identifies youth in the community, or youth might disclose themselves, [SAiF] is the service that they can direct people to if they need some mental-health support," said Kelleppan.
Kelleppan said the significant wait lists youth face before they're able to access counselling services is a barrier this new project will hopefully address.
"You will wait a very long time, particularly for youth but across the spectrum, for mental-health services, particularly if you don't have a diagnosed mental-health condition or mental illness," said Kelleppan.
At SAiF, youth between the ages of 12 to 17 can currently access up to 10 free counselling sessions.
“A third of Canadians report having experienced some type of abuse by the time they’re 16," Kelleppan said. "That’s a huge number of youth, and if we could get to them early enough, we can prevent some of these things.”
According to the Crisis Services Canada website, suicide accounts for 24 per cent of all deaths among youth between 15 to 24 in Canada.
The partnership between the St. Albert Food Bank and Community Village and SAiF is one of 13 recipients of the Alberta government's youth suicide prevention grant program.
The grant program is part of the province's five-year action plan for youth suicide prevention that began under the New Democratic Party government in 2019.
A government news release on June 10 announcing the recipients says the grant program "was created to help advance the outcomes laid out in the action plan and continue the work achieved through the plan over its first two years."
