When newly named Resilia Centre decided to take the leap to a new name, it was hoping to bring together two of the elements it was known for: one was for innovative mental health and settlement programs for newcomers, particularly refugees, to the city of Winnipeg – and the other was its continuation as a training centre for students in the Masters of Marriage and Family Therapy program at the University of Winnipeg, and low cost (sliding scale) individual and family therapy services.
Resilia executive director Abdi Ahmed said its former name – Aurora Family Therapy Centre – sometimes caused confusion because several businesses and other organizations had since taken “Aurora” as a part of their own name.
Even “family therapy,” or “marriage and family therapy” would sometimes leave people with the assumption that services wouldn’t be offered to single people, or a smaller family group, such as a single parent and child, clarified Wanda Yamamoto, another staff who has worked at the centre for many years.
It’s a change that other organizations have made too, he says – such as the recent renaming of the Canadian Association of Family Therapy to the Canadian Association for Couple and Family Therapy, to reflect that services are available to a broader range of people, and types of relationships.
But another benefit of Resilia’s new name, says Ahmed, is the word’s feeling of hope. “The people that we work with bring a lot of resilience,” he says. “We’ve embraced the name!”
In 1972, the organization was started to offer family therapy to a faith community, and those connections still play an important role in providing a network of mental health supports for people, explains Ahmed.
There is still a stigma around mental health, and in the case of newcomers, often a feeling that therapists could not understand their experience.
One of the greatest strengths at Resilia is that staff speak 25 languages, and come from very different backgrounds, says Ahmed. “They’re able to bring in their cultural perspectives and understanding to the people that they serve.”
“We normalize mental health as a spectrum. Whether you are healthy or suffering severe psychosis, we all suffer a mental health situation in some way and everybody needs to address that, and we are working with ethnnoultural and faith communities to be able to address mental health needs from different world views.
Resilia Centre works with refugees after they arrive on a psychosocial needs assessment “using highly vetted tools from Harvard University, World Health Organization and John Hopkins University,” said Ahmed.
The centre’s therapists are trained to work with the experience of trauma, offering a specialized homicide beavement program, and another program “to provide support to people who have have unresolved loss, like people who have lost family members that they cannot determine where they are,” he said.
A newer program at Resilia Centre offers training in vicarious trauma.
“There has been a huge interest. We’ve had our staff travel as far as Newfoundland, and Victoria to the west across the country to deliver to this program,” says Ahmed. “A lot of people are seeing the burnout among people who are working with people who have directly experienced trauma.”
In Manitoba, the centre has been working with safety officers, and emergency service personel who are dealing with evacuations of northern communities due to fire, and other situations, that can have an effect on people’s ability to work.
Ahmed says there are still many challenges to offering mental health services, partly because it is an invisible issue, and because all levels of government have kept it on the backburner in terms of funding. Some of their funding hasn’t increased over the last five years, he says, although there has been a jump in requests for services. The centre is part of the United Way of Winnipeg, and gratefully accepts donations.
Right now there is a wait list for individuals seeking therapy, however, currently, there is no waitlist for family members, or couples who would like to seek therapy sessions. People can contact ResiliaCentre.ca, or call 204.786.9251 for more information.