Stronger Communities

1. The Art of Asking Questions: Effective Strategies for Needs Assessment in Information and Referral

Good case management often requires connecting our clients with other resources and service providers. Completing a comprehensive needs assessment with your client helps you to connect them with the best possible referrals. Where resource scarcity occurs, asking the right questions can help you and your clients identify interim resources and options for coping.

Course Objectives:

1. Describe how making assumptions can interfere with the needs’ assessment process
2. Identify active listening strategies that can be used to gain further information about client needs, coping, and resources
3. Identify resource searching tools that can be used to search for accurate, up to date community resources

2. Confront the Discomfort

Anxiety is a normal reaction to uncertainty during challenging times. However, too much anxiety can take a toll on our daily lives and overall well-being. In this course, you will learn a variety of tools to recognize and react to important warning signs and confront your discomfort in a positive and healthy way.

Course Objectives:

1. Review general information about anxiety, the body’s stress response, and skills for calming the body
2. Explore the effects of worry, stress, and the emotional activators that contribute to anxiety
3. Discuss helpful coping strategies

3. Developing Self Compassion

Life can take a toll on our stress levels, our moods, our sense of control, our sense of the future, and our confidence. The best antidote to these impacts is self-compassion. This 1-hour interactive course will help you rediscover self-compassion and provide some tools to build this skill.

Course Objectives:

1. Define Self-Compassion
2. Identify the Benefits of Self-Compassion
3. Develop a practice of Self-Compassion

4. Rethinking Our Thoughts

What’s more important, thinking or feeling? Both! How we think and what we think can often make us feel better or worse. This one-hour workshop will help you learn about yourself and how your thoughts can affect how you feel and act. We will explore ways you can use your thoughts to help you deal with challenges and skills you can implement to help keep you grounded during these uncertain times.

Course Objectives:

1. Develop an understanding of the mutual and reciprocal relationship between thoughts, emotions, physical responses and behaviours
2. Learn skills to track, identify and challenge unhelpful thoughts
3. Gain knowledge on how to create individual routines that facilitate positive behavioural activation, wellness and personal recovery
4. Work to deal with our thoughts and emotions in a healthier, more balanced way

5. Stress Management

Many people are experiencing increased levels of stress in our ever-changing world. This 1-hour workshop will look at how our minds and bodies react to stress, and explore way to manage and cope with stress, as well as how to establish balance in these uncertain times.

Course Objectives:

1. Define the term “stress”
2. Identify the signs and symptoms of stress
3. Recognize our stress response
4. Practice techniques to respond to stress

6. Why am I so tired?

Many people are feeling very tired and fatigued right now. This one-hour interactive workshop will explore sleep and fatigue and why we may be feeling so tired lately.

Course Objectives:

1. Explain why sleep is so important for our health
2. Distinguish between the two different types of sleep
3. Identify strategies for better quality and quantity of sleep
4. Identify strategies for overcoming fatigue and tiredness

1. Good Grief: Supporting Someone Through Loss

“Time heals all wounds” is an often-used, well-intentioned statement that can have a negative impact on someone experiencing a loss. This workshop is for anyone who is interested in learning about loss and the grieving process, and about how to move beyond empty platitudes towards meaningful ways to acknowledge and support a person in their grief journey.

Course Objectives:

1. Define Loss
2. Identify stages in the grieving process
3. Describe disenfranchised grief
4. Identify helpful responses to say to a person who is grieving
5. Identify at least 2 resources in the Edmonton area who provide grief or bereavement supports

2. Handling Challenging Calls

Handling Challenging Calls examines barriers that can come up when communicating with clients by phone or text and suggests strategies that can help us overcome these barriers.

Course Objectives:

Identify strategies that can be used to communicate effectively with callers who:

1. Have lower levels of cognitive functioning
2. Are experiencing intense emotions during a call
3. Are using abusive behaviour towards the listener
4. Are under the influence of a substance
5. Are dealing with more issues than can be handled in one phone call

3. Hope Building 101

Clients who feel hopeless or helpless can challenge even the most skilled helpers. Hope Building 101 is for anyone who is interested in learning more about the importance of hope in working with clients, and how to use solution-focused techniques to gently challenge hopeless and helpless.

Course Objectives:

1. Define and distinguish hopeless and helpless thinking
2. Consider some factors that may influence hopeless and helpless thinking, such as trauma and crisis
3. Describe the importance of hope in the change making process of working with clients, from the perspective of both the client and the worker/helper
4. Examine solution-focused techniques as a strategy to gently challenge hopeless and helpless thinking
5. Identify strategies to support helpful and hopeful thinking as a worker/helper

4. Listening to Understand; How to be a Good Listener

How to be a Good Listener is for anyone who is interested in learning about the value of having effective listening skills, some of the attributes that make someone a good listener, and active listening skills that can be used to listen to understand, instead of listening to respond.  

Course Objectives:

1. Identify the benefits of being a good listener
2. Describe attributes help make someone a good listener through the acronym of GEENA (Genuine, Empathetic, Empowering, Nonjudgmental, and Assertive)
3. Use Active Listening Skills – Reflecting, Clarifying, Encouraging, Paraphrasing and Physical Presence to deepen understanding and connection during conversations

5. Mental Health Allyship

Mental Health Allyship is for anyone who is interested in learning about how to improve their allyship skills around mental health through examining stigma as it relates to mental health problems, by looking at the distinction and overlap between mental health and mental illness, and by learning about the recovery-oriented approach.

Course Objectives:

1. Define stigma and identify ways it impacts people living with mental health problems.
2. Describe how mental health and mental illness are distinct and overlapping.
3. Participants will learn how to apply the six dimensions of recovery-oriented practice

6. Stigma and Mental Illness Awareness

This workshop is a brief orientation into what stigma looks like from various perspectives, the impacts of stigma on those with mental illness, and how participants can support the de-stigmatization of mental illness and move towards a recovery oriented mindset to support those they know who are experiencing mental illness.

Course Objectives:

1. Define Mental Health and Mental Illness
2. Understanding and identifying stigma and its impacts
3. How we can help ourselves and each other

1. Crisis Intervention Basics

This workshop is for anyone who is interested in learning more about what it means to be in crisis, and how to best assist an individual who is actively in crisis. This presentation will provide a basic definition of crisis, will examine various responses individuals may have to crisis events, and will look at the Roberts’ Seven Stage Crisis Intervention Model as a framework to assist an individual in crisis. In addition, information will be shared about Edmonton-based crisis resources.

Course Objectives:

1. Define Crisis
2. Identify various behavioural and psychological responses to crisis
3. Examine the Roberts’ Seven Stage Crisis Intervention Model as a framework for intervention
4. Identify at least 2 community resources that support individuals in the Edmonton Area who are in active crisis

2. Mental Illness and Recovery

This workshop orients participants to the difference between mental health and mental illness and presents a number of different mental illness diagnoses and their attributes. A focus on recovery and all of the ways in which a person may go about recovery is discussed.

Course Objectives:

1. Learn about various mental illnesses, stigma, and recovery
2. Hear from people with lived experience with mental illness
3. Learn how we can support ourselves or those we care about

3. Building Better Boundaries Bite Size

Boundaries are so important. They keep you safe and let others know what’s OK and what’s not. This workshop will introduce you to the basics of establishing, protecting and respecting boundaries.

Course Objectives

1. Understand the basics of boundaries
2. Explore boundaries in relation to their needs and values