Mental Health and Wellbeing Toolkit

DIVERSEcity, through the Surrey Local Immigration Partnership, is creating a mental health and wellbeing toolkit for settlement, social and health service providers.

This toolkit aims to mitigate barriers to accessing culturally appropriate mental health care services. It strives to improve settlement and mental health outcomes for populations that have been marginalized by providing access to current, relevant and local services, resources and best practices, and train frontline staff on how to effectively use this toolkit.

This session covers the following:

• Introduction to the toolkit
• How to use the toolkit
• Discuss how the toolkit can support you in your work
• Engage in discussion about best practices on support newcomer immigrant and refugee populations
• Q&A Session

ABOUT THE PRESENTERS:

Mona Hassannia

Mona Hassannia is a Registered Clinical Counsellor (RCC) with Nia Counselling providing individual counselling as well as mental health debriefs and workshops to front-line staff and clients in the BC settlement sector. She has over 15 years of front-line and management experience in working with various populations including government-assisted refugees (GARs), refugee claimants, migrants, and immigrants.  As part of the supervisory team in BC’s “Operation Syrian Refugee”, she assisted with the largest refugee resettlement mission in Canadian history and has shared best practices in settlement and mental health at various speaking engagements including the National RAP Conference in Ottawa. She served as the manager of Settlement Orientation Services (SOS), a program serving only refugee claimants, and is well-informed on the mental health needs and challenges of those with precarious immigration status. Recently, she provided a series of national mental health wellness debriefs delivered virtually to quarantined Afghan refugee newcomers supporting them through the sudden evacuations. Her continued work within the sector focuses on various mental health projects and initiatives. Mona is a committed advocate for the mental health wellbeing of newcomers and supports the capacity building of frontline staff and organizations that serve them.

Bahar Taheri

Bahar Taheri is the founder and lead consultant with Blue Tree Project Solutions. Bahar has been working in the settlement and integration sector for over 10 years in a variety of roles. Currently, Bahar is the lead project consultant managing ISSofBC’s BC Refugee Hub, a capacity-building resource for those working with and supporting refugees in British Columbia, and AMSSA’s Migrant Worker Hub. Bahar has developed several mental health and wellbeing toolkits for the BC Refugee Hub and developed the content and multimedia tools for AMSSA’s Refugee Mental Health Frontline Workers Training e-learning course. As a project consultant, Bahar’s goal is always to bring together a variety of service providers and stakeholders to reach a common outcome. Bahar believes deeply in including the voices and experiences of newcomers and refugees to inform the work she does in the settlement and integration sector.