It starts with healing: Anishnabeg Outreach creates one stop shop for supports and education

The team at Anishnabeg Outreach have been working on a new online hub they believe will plant the seed for healing and reconciliation for Indigenous communities in Waterloo region and beyond.

AO Nest is still in the works, but once its complete late this fall, it'll be a one stop shop for supports and education, said Stephen Jackson, the organization's CEO. The online hub will have everything from mental health and addiction supports to financial literacy, life skills, language, recipes and more.

"Life skills and mental health equals people who have a future, have hope and have what everyone else has," Jackson said.

It has been a passion project for the organization and for Jackson, who envisioned the idea a year ago when he was looking for ways to offset the baby-boomer retirement and saw Indigenous communities across the country as a potential solution.

"They would be an excellent resource to offset the retirements, only if they could be healed," he said.

He says Indigenous peoples are dealing with hundreds of years of trauma that has led many to fall into addiction, homelessness and incarceration. He hopes AO Nest will help break that cycle.

"Healing, using the current paradigm, which is therapist led, isn't actually possible right now because there's not enough therapists to help and it's too expensive. It just isn't tenable," he said.

"So we looked at re-engineering it."

Jackson said by creating this stepping stone, they hope to give Indigenous communities choice and options in how they want to start or continue in their healing process and support future generations. 

"Once we do the healing, we can also give back culture, crafting, teachings, songs, stories and histories," he said.

Jackson said they are currently building pilots for a number of agencies, like those that serve children and youth and the homeless population and eventually work with dozens more.

Jackson said each module, particularly the mental health and addition portion, will have numerous courses and loads content that can meet people where they're at. The team reached out to organizations like Compass Community Services in Guelph to make sure the materials were clinically accurate.

Joanne Young Evans, executive director of Compass, said the creation of the mental health module has been a team collaboration between her staff and Anishnabeg Outreach.

"We support everything AO is doing and want to work with them so we know that it's being done clinically the way it  should be done, however, ensuring the Indigenous perspective and the Indigenous way of healing is also incorporated where it needs to be," Young Evans said.