CAT AT-A-GLANCE
Formed in: 2018
Number of members: 25
Communities served:
Name of Town: Campbell River,
Unique features:
An innovative Peer Employment Program and strong Indigenous-settler collaborations
A Q&A with Tracy Masters, Ray Goodwin, and Gwendolyn Donaldson of the Campbell River CAT.
“Everybody we work with does it out of love for our community. Everybody truly wants to see our community thrive and ultimately make it a better place,” – Gwendolyn Donaldson, CAT Coordinator
Members of Community Action Initiative sat down with Tracy Masters, Peer CAT Coordinator; Ray Goodwin, Peer Leader and Gwendolyn Donaldson, CAT Coordinator to discuss the evolutions, learnings and collaboration within the Campbell River CAT.
Raymond Goodwin (RG): We make it so people with lived or living experience with substance use just have to show up to our Peer Advisory Committee meetings or programs and that makes it easy for them to be a part of something. The Get the Point program peer outreach crew goes out to community, extracts sharps, and hands out harm reduction supplies. It’s great to have people who were homeless or using and who are now out there engaging and able to relate to people on the street. PWLLE take pride in cleaning up their neighbourhoods. So, when they get paid to do it, it’s a bonus.
Gwendolyn Donaldson (GD):
- I think our peer program is totally awesome and having such active members with lived and living experience is a really important part of our puzzle here. Everybody we work with does it out of love for our community. Everybody truly wants to see it thrive and ultimately make it a better place. The Peer Advisory Committee offers a very low barrier meeting where we create a safer, casual space to provide updates and to receive input on what the CAT is doing. This creates a feedback loop between leadership, the peer community, and the whole CAT group. We meet about once a month.
Tracy Masters (TM):
CAI: How does your CAT work in collaboration with regional health authorities?- We’ve also held peer training sessions which we mostly run with partnership with AIDS Vancouver Island. Over the years we have worked with them to decide what topics we should cover – from harm reduction, personal boundaries, and supportive conduct, queer awareness and sensitivity, and tenancy support.
GD: Kwakiutl District Health Council (KDC Health), who provides preventative and health promotion services for six member Nations on the northern part of the island, is well represented on our leadership team, and we help them run a number of initiatives like the Mobile Outreach Unit for Health and Support Services (MOUHSS – pronounced “Moose”) which is really making waves.
RG:
- The MOUHSS bus is a group that goes to three to four locations around town and hands out provisions like snacks and harm reduction tools, but also offers primary health care. We have a doctor – who is fantastic – on the bus who specializes in Opioid Agonist Therapy (OAT). The MOUHSS bus offers approachable services to anybody from a homeless person who needs wound treatment to someone working in construction across the street who just needs a snack.
GD:
CAI: Do you have any advice for newly formed CATs?- One of the benefits of Ray being on the team and out in the community on the MOUHSS bus is that he recruits other peers, paying honorariums on site. While the MOUHSS is servicing the community, there is often a working, peer-led Get the Point team doing clean up in the area as well. So, peers are able to drop-in and partake in this low barrier work and receive an honourarium for their casual labour. This also leads to them forming relationships with the Peer Leaders, and so they are then more likely to engage with the MOUHSS services while also working with the peer-led clean up team, and be exposed to other services that offer care. This is an easy and low barrier way to connect.
TM: My advice would be to get as many local city service providers involved in leadership as possible. Get someone from the RCMP, mental health services, a social worker, nurse practitioners, and anyone who has a specialized background. This allows different perspectives to learn from each other. That’s when you can really focus on that crossover of communication and come up with ideas and strategies together.
GD:
- Adding to that, it’s important to set up a decision-making structure from the beginning. It’s great to have all these incredible ideas coming from a large and diverse group of passionate people, but the big challenge is really in the implementation plan. In the beginning, really think about what your core values are – the real core actions and how you’re going to make decisions – and then act from there. For us, we identified peer engagement as a core value for our CAT, so that’s what we always come back to. I’m so grateful for the team we have involved. We're lucky to have such a solid collection of people.
News
Stigma can be the hardest hurdle to get over for people recovering from addiction
2021.02.24
|Campbell River Mirror
Campbell River’s Get the Point project helps clean streets, break down stigma
2021.01.27
|Campbell River Mirror
Why homeless people are helping clean up pandemic trash in this B.C. community
2020.08.21
|CBC News
New Campbell River outreach program empowering volunteers
2020.08.09
|Campbell River Mirror
Homeless volunteers cleaning up homeless camps in Campbell River
2020.08.20
|Chek News
Community invited to discuss root causes of drug use in Campbell River
2019.04.16
|Campbell River Mirror
Province announces $1.5 million in funding to combat overdose epidemic
2018.02.01
|Campbell River Mirror
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