Stronger Together: Building Inter-agency Integrated Supports and Services for Newcomer Mental Health

By Ronni Abraham, Manager, Settlement & Mental Health for The Immigrant Education Society (TIES) in Calgary, AB.

Contact
Email: [email protected]
Phone: 587-392-3414
Website: TIES | English Language Classes, Jobs & Support for Newcomers to Calgary (immigrant-education.ca)

Quick Facts

Population of interest:
Newcomers. We use this term inclusively to refer to immigrants, refugees and protected persons, asylum seekers, temporary foreign workers, international students, and the relatives of people in these groups. We also include racialized members of ethno-cultural groups who frequently experience challenges similar to those observed in people more recently arrived.

Location:
Calgary, Alberta

The need:
The lack of culturally relevant and primary language accessible mental health supports in mainstream services and the scarcity of culturally-based supports by immigrant-serving organizations produce significant health inequities for newcomers. Many factors complicate newcomers’ process of seeking mental health and crisis support services. Cultural beliefs, language needs, shame and stigma, gender, age, immigration status, prior experience with systems, and many other factors influence the likelihood that a newcomer will seek mental health services and that their needs will be met when they do.

About the intervention
Stronger Together Thinking refers to the coordinated and collective efforts needed to create lasting change at individual, family, community, and systems levels. The Immigrant Education Society (TIES) used this thinking to bring together key agency partners to work together to improve availability and access to much needed mental health supports and services for the newcomers in our community. Stronger Together Thinking leverages organizational strengths, areas of expertise, and existing programming to create a multi-faceted and multi-level plan that makes impacts much greater than any one agency or organization can achieve alone.

Two Stronger Together initiatives demonstrate the value of this approach:

Building Equitable Newcomer Crisis Help (BENCH)
The BENCH partnership brought together three immigrant-serving organizations who were key players in addressing mental health needs of newcomers along with Calgary Distress Centre. BENCH introduced culturally responsive crisis services that were not previously available in Calgary. BENCH provides immediate assistance for newcomers in crisis by connecting them with workers who help them to stabilize, identify solutions, and connect with resources that mitigate future crisis events. Importantly, BENCH also works to increase capacity of mainstream crisis providers for more culturally informed approaches and improves newcomers’ connections to specialized services tailored for them.

Linking All Cultures Equitably (LACE) LACE is a transformational service enhancement and mobilization project involving four of Calgary’s immigrant-serving organizations. LACE partners work individually, in joint projects, and collectively to addresses significant gaps in mental health services for newcomers. Core strategies include service enhancements, creating new services, streamlining referral and system navigation, developing safer spaces and more diverse ways of receiving services, and mobilizing natural supports. Addressing racism and discrimination as a core issue affecting access and service uptake, is a core consideration of all LACE projects.

What's promising?
Stronger Together Thinking requires us to offer our organizational strengths and expertise to catalyze a shared vision of the future. When applied to shortcomings in mental health supports and services for newcomers, we have seen tremendous momentum. We identify nine specific impacts from our community’s commitment to come together for good.

Key takeaway:
Deep commitment to meaningful collaboration and well-aligned coordination of efforts to address large community needs results in comprehensive strategies that maximizes available resources and that make real differences for newcomers in our communities.

About the organization
The Immigrant Education Society (TIES) is a not-for-profit charitable organization that has been actively serving newcomers and low-income Calgarians since 1988. TIES' primary goal is to provide immigrants and economically disadvantaged individuals with a solid foothold in Canada and afford them the opportunities for belonging within their new community. TIES Healthy Minds offers a suite of mental health supports and services that improve the holistic well-being of newcomers and other vulnerable Albertans using low-barrier, culturally responsive, and multi-language approaches. Our core goal is to increase newcomers’ access to and engagement with activities and services that improve their mental health and well-being.