About • Community Action Initiative

We are Community Action Initiative (CAI), a nonprofit organization transforming mental health and substance use (MHSU) support across B.C.

Where Communities Lead, Better Health Follows.

At our core, we’re connectors between grassroots organizations and government. Our role is to nurture community-led efforts, helping align their needs with broader provincial objectives while prioritizing unique local contexts.

Our approach is rooted in capacity building, trust-based granting, and creating strong relationships with the communities we engage. That’s how we ensure that local wisdom and lived experiences actively shape Mental Health and Substance Use (MHSU) programming and resource allocation.

We believe that lasting change starts with listening to communities. And together with our partners, we’re fostering a more community-centred approach to MHSU programming that reflects and serves the people it aims to support.

Get to know our team

Our Vision

Community-based agencies are key partners in addressing mental health and substance use in BC.

Our Mission

To strengthen the role and capacity of the community sector to improve mental health and address substance use for British Columbians.

Our Values

Community Knowledge:

Working directly with community to leverage local knowledge and build a strong and sustainable Mental Health and Substance Use sector through applying an equity lens to issues and solutions that extend beyond grant-making.

Collaboration:

Supporting partnerships and collaboration across sectors to reduce systems barriers and empower collective action.

Inclusion:

Promoting diverse and culturally safe organizations, service providers, volunteers, and engaging individuals and families with lived and living experience across the lifespan.

Continuous Learning:

Pursuing strategies informed by evidence, historical context, traditional knowledge, and the voices of community.

Accountability:

Ensuring sound stewardship of resources and accountability for impact.

Land Acknowledgement

We at Community Action Initiative (CAI) believe in the power of community to bring us together and help create a better, more just world. We acknowledge that our work takes place on the unceded traditional homelands of the Coast Salish Peoples. Specifically, our office is on the homelands of the skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), selílwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh), and xwməθkwəýəm (Musqueam) Nations.Through our 10+ years of work we also recognize the forced displacement of Indigenous people in their own lands and that our work and gathering of people across the province takes place on many traditional and unceded homelands. For those of us who are settlers, we have a responsibility to understand how today’s accepted practices of grant making are the product of very specific histories. We commit to doing our own internal work and to building relationships with others so that we can transform ourselves and shift mainstream funding practices in service of equity, truth, and reconciliation.