Youth & Community Engagement

Our youth and community engagement work is a vital link to young people and the individuals, services, and communities that are important to them. This work includes:

Promoting and raising awareness about young people’s rights, advocacy strategies, and the role of our office through presentations and participation in community events.
Centring reconciliation in our work and strengthening our relationships with Indigenous young people, families, and communities.

FAMILY ENGAGEMENT

Family engagement is grounded in a set of guiding principles that inform how to work with families to ensure engagement is authentic and meaningful:

Families are experts in their children and youth.
The needs of children and youth are considered within the framework of the family unit.
Family strengths, capacity, and resiliency are emphasized.
Families are partners at all levels of the system and system planning.
Professionals maintain collaborative relationships with families.
Families are experts in their needs and capacity to support their children and youth.
Families are partners in the development and evaluation of services.

Parenting a Child or Youth with Mental Health Challenges:

Parenting can be a demanding task, especially if your child or youth is experiencing mental health challenges. Our programs aim to assist families to better understand their child’s difficulties as well as to find new and creative long-term solutions that respect each family’s unique and sometimes complex needs.

We define family in the broadest sense to include relatives, friends and any other important supports for your family and child.

It’s a Partnership

At Courtesy, we recognize the importance of families being active partners throughout the service delivery process. We strive to develop strong collaborative alliances with you. As the caregiver, you are the expert in the life of your child. We will solicit your input and feedback to help guide the direction of the treatment.

Helping families learn constructive strategies to use in the home is a critical component of sustaining growth and development. While enhancing the strengths and interconnectedness of your family, we hope to help you access knowledge, skills and resources that facilitate an improved quality of life.

We value you as an essential member of your child’s care team and look forward to providing quality services while partnering with you through this phase of your journey.

Family Advisory Network

Helping to Make Change Happen

Not only is youth and family engagement an important component of service delivery, but it is also critical to transforming our system. We define family engagement as an ongoing process that includes families as active decision makers and partners at the organizational and system levels. In supporting this ongoing work, we have established the Family Advisory Network to help embed families voice into all that we do.

Families and caregivers within our Family Advisory Network are volunteers and are provided a comprehensive orientation, ongoing learning and training opportunities and supports to remove barriers to participation. They meet on a regular basis to connect with our team and to help our organization learn and grow from family perspective and experiences. Our family engagement motto (co-developed with families) is:

“We are better when we grow together!”