by fizza | Mar 17, 2021 | Uncategorized
Hi everyone,
I’ve had a blast these last couple months getting to meet such amazing youth and adult allies across the province! Last week, I had the chance to visit another awesome TNM group with our partner agency Open Doors for Lanark Children & Youth. I’ve been eager to visit this group ever since they became a part of our network late last year!
This group has been doing such a wonderful job building relationships with one another, and I could really tell how the adult allies have created an environment that encourages youth to be bold, and brave. It is so important in the times we are in now to really focus on building relationships since we’ve gone virtual, we’re all missing that in person connection. We spent the meeting connecting with one another, and I came to know that a youth in the group has been on TV multiple times, and will be starring in a film soon….. I was SO starstruck being in the presence of a celebrity.
We spent the meeting having conversations on recruitment strategies, school mental health, and so much more! We also spoke about the work we’re doing at The New Mentality surrounding anti-racism and mental health. Something that really stood out the most to me was when a youth in the group shared about the reality of speaking on topics such as politics, race, and religion were something that folks would never discuss in the past because they were considered taboo in society. More recently, we’ve been able to give these topics more attention, encourage them to be discussed, and have had healthy conversations surrounding them.
Having these conversations can be uncomfortable for many, but this group has created an environment where everyone is cared for, where they are encouraged to learn and unlearn together. I was incredibly impressed and proud to see the group share with me the growth they’ve experienced during the pandemic and have created a virtual space that has felt safe and comfortable for them.
I’m so happy I got the chance to spend time with the group, and am looking forward to visiting them again and continuing our conversations together. I’m also very much looking forward to seeing our celebrity youth on TV soon!
See you all soon on zoom,
Fizza Abbas, Network Coordinator
by fizza | Mar 5, 2021 | Uncategorized
Hello everyone,
I’ve really been having so much fun visiting all our groups across the province virtually, and sharing with all of you my experience! I’ve heard from many youth and adult allies that they have been inspired by the awesome projects our groups are working on.
Last week I had the chance to visit another incredible TNM group in Brantford with our partner agency Woodview Mental Health & Autism Services! Before the pandemic, I was eager to meet this group in person and was so happy to have the chance to visit their group virtually. It was also their first time meeting one of their new adult allies who was joining the group!
We began the meeting with a great check in question, check in questions are a great facilitation technique as they help to ground us and see how folks are doing and adjusting the way we facilitate accordingly. The question asked was “what is your brag/drag?” My brag was definitely getting to meet the group, as I had been eagerly waiting all week! From the check ins, I learned that I definitely need to start watching WandaVision, and that there are so many new Pokémon that I had no idea about…..I wish I had the chance to quickly go grab my Pokémon card collection from 17 years ago….
After checking in, we heard updates from the adult allies and it was so nice to see that the group encourages and promotes events happening in other New Mentality groups. In the updates they shared that our New Mentality group with The Maltby Centre in Kingston will be hosting a Men’s Mental Health event! I really appreciated this, as it furthered showcased how amazing and supportive our network is of one another.
After the updates, I came to know of the many projects our group is working on, from creating social media content, to hosting a talent not required show for Children’s Mental Health Week, working on a podcast, creating a brochure for adult allies to know how to best support youth and so much more, that I don’t even think I can capture in one blog!
The group spent time discussing each of their projects, but their main focus was on reviewing a draft version of their brochure. I really appreciated how youth were supporting one another through the conversations on how to better present the brochure. I was incredibly impressed by the youth who created the brochure using Canva, and I’m starting to notice a pattern of all the awesome Canva and PowerPoint stars we have in our network. Definitely giving up the Canva Crown to all the amazing youth in our network.
After working for a bit, we spent the end of the meeting playing a game of Psych! If you haven’t heard of this game you have to play it, it’s so funny and the responses that the youth came up with during the game were so creative and hilarious!
I’m so happy I got the chance to meet these brilliant changemakers that make up our network, and can’t wait to visit them again… and hopefully try out our lip syncing Brady Bunch style Zoom show!
See you all soon on zoom,
Fizza Abbas, Network Coordinator
by fizza | Feb 26, 2021 | Uncategorized
Yes, yes I know what you’re thinking….She is still travelling Ontario virtually? I’m just getting started!
Last week, I had the chance to connect with our New Mentality group in Peterborough that is with our partner agency Peterborough Youth Services. It was my first time meeting a group virtually through Microsoft Teams, and not Zoom… I felt like I was truly a fish out of water!
It was so nice to connect with the adult allies before meeting the youth and to hear how they’ve been adjusting to the virtual world. Fun fact: Peterborough Youth Services’ Executive Director is one of the two adult allies than run The New Mentality group, how cool is that?
There were no introductions needed! The group and I got straight into talking about all the shows we’ve been binge-watching lately, and the Netflix parties we’ve been having with our friends. We collectively decided that we needed to finally add Bridgerton next on our shows to binge watch list.
The youth shared with me that they are working on two murals for Peterborough Youth Services. I could tell how thoughtful and intentional the youth and adult allies were when having discussions around what type of message they would like to push forward both at the agency and community level. They want to highlight themes of growth, inclusivity, and equity! One youth took time to design visuals for what the mural could look like, and I was stunned by how beautiful the designs looked. In fact, I thought the images were taken from Google, but I was mistaken!
These youth are always looking for new ways to advocate in their community, and to get the word out there of amazing work that they are up to! In addition to the mural, the youth are also working on planning to host a talent show in the coming months, which was so exciting to hear.
I still can’t stop laughing about this, but the funniest part of it all was when I was trying to take a group photo, but couldn’t figure out how to take screenshot and still have everyone be a part of the picture on Microsoft Teams! It took many….many tries, and I appreciate the youth for being very patient with me and laughing along the way.
I can’t wait to meet the youth again, and hopefully take a “real” group photo in front of their amazing future mural!
See you all soon on zoom,
Fizza Abbas, Network Coordinator
by Milan Santos | Feb 18, 2021 | Uncategorized
These past 4 weeks have been amazing, getting to meet our New Mentality groups from across the province!
Last week, I had the chance to connect with the adult allies of our New Mentality group in Elgin and Oxford counties that are with our partner agency Wellkin Child and Youth Mental Wellness. Before I do my virtual group visit, I make sure that I connect with the adult allies beforehand. It is important to me to recognize the incredible adult allies that make up our network, and all the hard work they put in!
I was eager to meet the adult allies, as they have been so busy working hard to support their youth and their community. I’m a pretty big fan of these two adult allies, as I’ve seen how they uplift their youth and make sure their voices are heard at every level. As always, this group is so busy from working on implementing and building sensory walls at their agency, writing an open letter to the employers of youth in their community, working on a big Children’s Mental Health Week event coming up in a few months and on top of that running their weekly Youth Hub on Thursdays… and you might not believe me, but I’ve just touched the surface of all the work they are doing!
I really appreciate the adult allies as they continuously share with their youth the importance of flowing between rest and action. With all of us, having almost been a year into the pandemic, it’s important to make time for rest and play.
After many laughs, and connecting over the many accomplishments the group has done and continues to do, I was eager to attend The Hub where one of the youth would be hosting a games night for youth in the community. The Hub is a weekly drop-in wellness space for youth aged 13 to 25, and youth from our New Mentality group at Wellkin were leaders in creating this space. I learned that initially The Hub was supposed to happen in person, but due to COVID they quickly turned it into a Virtual Hub! In the times we are in now, it’s important to prioritize relationship building. To learn more about The Hub click here, and about the exciting news that Ontario Trillium Foundation’s Resilient Communities Fund has funded to expand the Hub here!
I was eager to attend and learn new games to play online! I was so impressed by the youth in our network who was leading and facilitating the session. There was fun music playing at the beginning to get us dancing, a warm welcome, and a powerful acknowledgement of the land we are on. I loved that everyone was given the option through Zoom polls to choose what game they would like to play, and the majority of us selected our first game to be Pop Culture Trivia which was so fun and so well put together, not to mention there were some big Marvel fans in the space! After that, we played emoji decoding, and again I was so amazed by how much work and effort was put into planning this…..and as the renowned PowerPoint queen, I might have to give my title up to this youth!
I’m looking forward to visiting all the youth virtually again soon, and can’t wait for when we can gather again in person, and connect about all the amazing work they continue to do!
See you all soon on zoom,
Fizza Abbas, Network Coordinator
by Milan Santos | Feb 12, 2021 | Uncategorized
Hello TNM Community,
Since our last update in November, a lot has been cooking behind the scenes that we would like to share.
For those who participated in Disable the Label 2020: Reconnect & Reconvene and the Open Forum: Why is it so hard to talk about race in our network? at the end of 2020, you know we were planning on launching an anti-racism program this month. We want you to know that we haven’t stopped, and our commitment still remains that we will continue to embed anti-racism frameworks into all our network’s advocacy work and community.
This is the first important thing we want you to know: we have learned that by going fast and by not thinking and feeling through things, we create problems and contribute to existing problems. A part of our learning about being anti-racist is to slow things down. This is also why we haven’t started meeting again as a network. We’re not quite ready enough.
We decided that we needed to take a step back before we planned more conversations with everybody. We did this for a few reasons.
We know that we’ve built trust when it comes to our annual programming such as Disable the Label, asking you to step into the unknown feels somehow comfortable at times because the vision, intention, and outcome is clear and is being held full heartedly by our hosting team. That took many years to build. We need some time to really develop our work before we ask our network to step in.
We want to slow down the processes in order to do it with intention. In order to deliver Disable the Label 2020, Disable the Label 2020: Reconnect and Reconvene, and the December 2020 Open Forum we had to move at a pace that was so quick it didn’t allow us to really communicate the purpose, goals, and plan of our work. It also didn’t leave space for the emotional labour of our work.
We are now working with an advisory team of folks who are familiar to the network to hold this work and build the container for it. They are Duane Hall (known as lighthaüs), Devonna Munroe (known as Devynne), Jenny Katz, and Vanessa Reid.
We know we will make mistakes, and that there will be roadblocks along the way – we are not striving for perfection – we know that with this group and engagement from our network, we will create something that allows our network to go deep with our anti-racism conversations and hold the space needed to host this important work.
The goals of this advisory group is to:
- Evaluate, reflect, and create documentation that highlights our journey thus far, lessons learned, things we would continue to do (timeline of this reflection is May-December 2020)
- Develop 1-3 actionable strategy for TNM to embed anti-racism frameworks into our advocacy work and network culture
We would like these two deliverables to be completed by April 2021.
We are now catching up with all that we’ve learned since June and in the past on the topic of TNM and racism and our efforts towards anti-racism.
We need your help.
We need our youth and adult allies’ wisdom and reflection – youth will be compensated for their time, energy, and knowledge through honorariums. *Please contact us before submitting to confirm honorarium.
Here’s a way to get involved. If what you read below isn’t what you want to do, but you want to be involved in some other way, let us know!
Reflect on:
- DTL 2020 (and/or DTL 2018, 2019), and/or
- DTL 2020 Reconnect and Reconvene and/or
- December 2020 Open Forum
We want your real, honest, and raw account through:
- One word or sentence or longer
- A piece of art
- A poem
- A song
- Multimedia
- A video
- A conversation with Mary-Anne or Fizza (let us know who)
Here are some examples of things to tell us about:
- What was comfortable?
- What was uncomfortable?
- What worked?
- What didn’t work?
- What did you love or what excited you?
- what do you never want us to do again?
- What did you learn?
- What did you learn about yourself?
- What did you learn about others?
- What did you heal?
- How did you get hurt?
- How did you deal with that?
- What advice or ideas or insights do you have for next steps or even far into the future?
Please send us your reflections pieces by: Monday, March 1, 2021.
Email Mary-Anne, TNM Program Manager at mary-anne@thenewmentality.ca and/or Fizza Abbas, Network Coordinator at fizza@thenewmentality.ca
If you have any questions, concerns, feedback please reach out.
With gratitude,
Mary-Anne & Fizza
by Milan Santos | Feb 10, 2021 | Uncategorized
As many of you know, I’ve been road tripping across the province via Zoom!
Last week I had the chance to visit our New Mentality group in Kirkland Lake, with our partner agency North Eastern Ontario Family and Children’s Services (NEOFACS). Before the pandemic I was eager to visit Kirkland Lake, as I had heard so many great things about it from Mary-Anne, The New Mentality’s Program Manager!
Even though I wasn’t able to physically visit, my virtual visit was nothing short of absolutely amazing. The adult allies have been doing an awesome job keeping everyone engaged in this virtual world by dropping off pizza and snacks before the meeting (I know, I know, super cool!)
For our New Mentality group in Kirkland Lake the restrictions with the pandemic have been quite different. A couple months ago, they were able to go bowling while social distancing and now are building relationships through Zoom.
During my group visit, we played a game of Scribbl.io which is a super fun game of Pictionary. Myself and one of the adult allies for our New Mentality Kirkland Lake group played this game during Disable the Label this past summer during a wellness night session! It is such a fun and competitive game, and let me tell you we really got into it… some folks even went and brought their stylus to play this game! I don’t think I’ve laughed that hard in some time. I apologize again to the group for my very poor drawing of Bambi….
After such a fun game, we talked about life in Kirkland Lake and I learned that some students drive a snowmobile to school, which solidified even more that I would like to move up there!
Though the meeting was only meant to be an hour long, we stayed on the line just getting to know each other and connecting. The youth and I talked about the issues that are important to us to advocate for in the Child and Youth Mental Health system. One issue that was important is the experiences of Indigenous folks accessing services, and how important it is to see your identity reflected in your counsellor. Racialized youth should not need to question their identity in order to appeal to a system that wasn’t built for them in the first place. There is a need to build a system that breaks barriers, and recognizes all cultures and experiences.
I can’t completely describe the feeling I had while visiting the youth and adult allies, but it was one of acceptance, laughter, and genuine connection. Ever since I’ve visited, I’ve been eager to visit again and also redeem myself in another game of Scribbl.io… I’m coming back for that #1 spot!
I look forward to continuing my zoom road trip across the province, and getting to meet all of you. I’m not surprised at all and very proud to see all of you continuously going above and beyond to change the Child and Youth Mental Health system.
See you all soon on zoom,
Fizza Abbas, Network Coordinator
