BC residents will continue to benefit from access to low and no-cost counselling services.
To meet the growing demand for mental health care and services, the province invested over $4 million to support the ongoing work of 49 community agencies, 3 of which are in the Cariboo.
Janice Breck, Executive Director for the Canadian Mental Association Cariboo Chilcotin Branch in Williams Lake explained how this will help her organization.
“It’s imperative to our community that people are able to access counselling for no cost, and what this funding does is it enables us to be able to hire enough staff, because we have high need level in our community with fires happening in 2017, now with COVID, with the discovery of the 215 children in Kamloops, and now our own discovery at the St Joseph’s Mission, there’s just a lot of need for counselling, and when it’s not free, it limits the accessibility for individuals who are on low income.”
Breck noted that since 2017 the need for counselling has been increasing.
“We were able with this funding to hire two extra councillors which mean for our adult population in our community we now have four councillors and that has definitely helped us reduce our waitlist and currently we don’t have a waitlist.”
The Quesnel Women’s Resource Centre and Cariboo Family Enrichment Centre in 100 Mile House, will also benefit from this funding which extends support to these organizations to provide ongoing services until March 31st, 2023.
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