Action Therapy is available for youth who are in the care of Child and Family Services. Our program is specifically designed for Indigenous youth as much of our programming is Indigenous based as well as connected to ceremony.
Action Therapy includes wrap around support, individual, family and group counselling, crisis intervention, case management, consultation, connection to Aboriginal Traditional community, paid work experience, recreational activities and community service. (See below for additional details.)
Within Action Therapy we include other therapies such as equine, play, art, music and other creative expressive therapies. We regularly run cultural, equine, cooking, adventure and land based therapy groups.
Land based therapy includes gardening, harvesting medicines, harvesting wood and stones for ceremony, building lodges, fishing and ice fishing, hunting and trapping and facilitating hunter safety education.
We respond to messaging and/or phone calls from our youth and their caregivers between 7:00 A.M. till 11:00 P.M. seven days a week 365 days a year.
We spend a minimum of 10 hours a month working with a youth, often many more hours than that.. The treatment plan is negotiated between ourselves, the worker, and the client.
We also cover our own mileage and anything we spend on the youth. We have bought our youth meals, hair cuts, ball caps, shoes, etc. Written progress reports and treatment summaries are provided.
Services for ‘At Risk Youth & Families’ (‘At Risk’ includes but is not limited to: gang involvement, sexual exploitation, addictions, self-harm, mental health issues, problems with the law, school refusal, etc.)
Donations of Furniture (Beds, Couches, Household Goods etc.) for the youth and families we work with,
Help to our families who need to move,
Paid work experience including community service activities such as re-distributing furniture and household items to community members, recycling, helping people move, community clean up, and being Traditional Ceremony helpers.
All of our therapists/mentors receive clinical supervision from a Masters’ level clinician with 30 years experience.
Our therapists/mentors are on call to our clients every waking minute. We also work as a team covering for each other so that every crisis is responded to by someone.
Our therapists/mentors have truck and trailers available to them in order to conduct one of our important community service functions known as Lateral Empathy where youth experience the intrinsic rewards of helping others in need, Most weekends our team can be seen helping people move or helping them access furniture, clothing, household goods, food and toys for children and families in the community.
Action therapy is recognized by Justice Manitoba as a community service site for youth on Probation..
Youth involved in Action Therapy have the opportunity to certify in "Food Handling", "Hunter Safety", "C.P.R.", "First Aid", and other such trainings.
Our therapists/mentors work or have worked in positions that serve as connections to other resources such as the Youth Addiction Stabilization Unit, the Manitoba Youth Centre, the Emergency Department Violence Intervention Program, Youth Probation, Youth Bail Management, Urban Circle and Child and Family Services among many others.
Various members of the Action Therapy team have expertise in the following areas of treatment: addictions, gangs, sexual abuse, sexual exploitation, self-harm, eating disorders, and school refusal.
Our therapists/mentors utilize the following therapeutic approaches: Person Centered, Strengths, Structural, Bio-psych-social, Systems, Brief Solution, Narrative, Stages of Change and Crisis models.
With this training, experience and clinical supervision, all of our therapists/mentors are able to engage in clinical conversations and therapeutic interventions with the youth and their families.
Action therapy ends up being a powerful therapeutic community where all our children and the adults in their charge know one another, sweat together, cry together, share together and heal together.
The Action therapy community gets involved with other wonderful community projects such as Smudge the Streets, Got Bannock, and events surrounding Missing and Murdered People and other community violence prevention initiatives.
Empowering our youth to take up civic responsibility and engagement is fundamentally based in knowing about the current reality for the youth we work with. Having up to date information on current issues, and the ability for our Action Therapists to include youth in assisting with systemic change creates sustainability, and ultimately provides our youth the opportunity to be part of something bigger. Our Action Therapists/mentors believe that strong youth equals strong communities. To that end we have supported some of our youth in participating as Sundancers. We have also as a team committed to Sundance ourselves. Some of us are Sundance veterans, and some of us have just begun this commitment.