AT-A-GLANCE
Adults living in Esquimalt and the Greater Victoria Area.
COVID-19 Surge Grants
What This Grantee Is Doing for Community Counselling
Since 1994, Esquimalt Neighbourhood House Society (ENH) has offered free, short-term, accessible, supportive counselling for adults living in the Greater Victoria Area. ENH’s community-based mental health and addictions counselling program is an entry-point, a responsive and respectful service, and a way of accompanying people who are seeking help. Services are tailored to individual needs, attentive to how people know themselves and what they want, aware of structural and societal inequities and injustices, and steeped in values of building trust, honoring the whole person, really seeing and hearing people, and providing compassionate and meaningful supports.
Counselling is primarily offered by phone and video. There are a myriad of reasons why people are seeking help—ill health, crises, losses, diminishing strengths/coping, trauma (to name a few)--and quite often people identify that many things are going on all at once.
Quote
"With CAI funding, we have been able to expand our counselling service, meet the significant increase in demand and to respond to requests for counselling in a very timely, and often times, immediate fashion. For example, we regularly hear from clients about how they are only able to get onto waitlists when approaching other community mental health services. Overall, our service aims to be accessible and with a strength-based/whole person focus; no matter what the complexity/acuity of what someone presents with, our keen interest in connecting with this unique/complicated person, means that we are humble and respectful about how we sign on, offer support, and generate some hope and ways to go forward."