Image Credit: Foundry Kelowna / Daniel Jones Photography

By Ashley Legassic

FOUNDRY BC

Foundry BC looking for communities to express interest in having one-stop-shop for youth mental health services

Nov 13, 2019 | 2:29 PM

VANCOUVER — An organization that’s focused on being a one-stop-shop for young people with mental health and substance use issues is asking communities across the province to reach out if they’d like a local model in their area.

Foundry BC is a network of community-based health and social service centres and resources for young people aged 12 to 24 and their families.

There are eight Foundry centres across the province, including two on Vancouver Island, three in the Lower Mainland, one in Kelowna, one in Penticton and one in Prince George.

Foundry BC Executive Director Steve Mathias says between the locations — with two more in the works — thousands of young people are being seen at Foundry centres.

“So in any given year, our eight centres are serving well over 10,000 young people, in smaller communities we have approximately 1,000 young people that are using our services, and then the larger communities and the larger centres we’re seeing as many as 2,000 or more young people per year,” Mathias says. “We are seeing a tremendous amount of unmet need as young people who have never accessed services before, have never reached out to ask for help, are now coming through the doors in fairly large numbers. So that’s something that we are in many ways concerned to see, but also recognizing that the Foundry model seems to be resonating with young people, particularly those in their late teenage years.”

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Mathias says Foundry was created in 2015 in partnership with B.C.’s previous Liberal government and a group of philanthropists. The goal of the organization is to create a one-stop-shop model for young people to get mental health help and social services when they need them on demand.

Now, Foundry wants to expand its reach across the province and have more locations.

“As part of the recently launched strategic platform by our current government, there was an announcement for an additional grouping of Foundry centres, as many as eight, and we’re currently underway with an expression of interest from communities around the province,” Mathias says. “We understand that there’s quite a bit of support for this model. The idea obviously is that it’s a community-based model, it just happens to be Foundry everywhere, but it’s very much community-led.”

Foundry has opened an expression of interest phase which will close November 26.

“So in the next couple of weeks, we expect to see communities put their hands up and say, ‘Yes, this is a model that we’d really like to see’, and we’ll be reviewing those applications,” Mathias says. “There’ll be a group selected coming out of the expression of interest (phase), and they’ll be moved on to a second phase, and in March we’ll be announcing six new communities.”

B.C.’s Ministry of Mental Health and Addictions released “A Pathway to Hope” earlier this year, which is a ten-year roadmap for mental health and addictions care.

At this point, the City of Kamloops has no plans to express its interest in having a Foundry location here.

“Municipalities don’t have to front a cost but they are often a partner that come with inclined resources or funding to support the cost of building out the centres,” Mathias says. “So the centres are really intended to be built with a mixture of provincial grants as well as philanthropic and municipal supports, and so it’s really intended to bring funding from numerous sources together. So municipalities have varied in terms of their contribution, but typically there is something significant that comes from the municipality.”

The City of Kelowna’s finance director says the City hasn’t had to provide any funding for its Foundry location since it was established in September, 2017.

Mathias says the holistic approach of Foundry is especially appealing to First Nations youth.

“We know that Indigenous young people come through Foundry doors in fairly large numbers. I think the holistic approach we tend to use, the community approach, is something that’s very attractive to Indigenous young people,” Mathias says. “Approximately 10 to 12 per cent of the young people who come through our doors self-identify as Indigenous, in some of our centres we have had elders in residence, we also have partnerships with a couple of our Aboriginal Friendship Centres. I think we are all striving to improve the services that we can provide and co-design with Indigenous young people, and we hope to see, in the next year, a significant improvement in that quality of network.”

To learn more about expressions of interest for Foundry, go here.