Jan. 31 is Bell Let’s Talk Day.
People across the country will take to their phones and social media accounts to talk about mental health and raise funds for mental health initiatives. The idea is that for every tweet, text and so on, Bell donates five cents.
Since its inception eight years ago, the campaign has raised over $86 million. But where does all of that money go?
According to organizations in the province, Bell Let’s Talk has had a big impact on mental health programming locally.
Last year alone, Choices for Youth and Stella’s Circle, two organizations in St. John’s, received grants from the Bell Let’s Talk Community Fund. Through that fund, Bell provides grants in the range of $5,000 to $25,000 to projects across Canada that improve access to mental health care, supports and services.
Choices for Youth (CFY) received a $22,000 grant last year. CFY is an organization in the St. John’s area that serves at-risk and homeless youth. The funding enabled the organization to address a long-recognized need for mental health services geared toward male-identifying and gender non-conforming youth.
Shelter co-ordinator Andrew Harvey says this has been a huge identified gap for the organization in terms of programming, and they simply have not had the funding to make it happen until they received the Bell Let’s Talk grant.
“There’s lots of stigma for everyone, I think, but with men it’s even more so, ‘don’t talk about it,’ or ‘bottle it up,’ ‘man up,’” Harvey said. “We’re really trying to counteract that, break down that stigma, and normalize it — normalize having conversations about how you’re feeling.”
Harvey says they have had a mental health program for female-identifying youth for a while. With the funding from Bell Let’s Talk, they were able to develop the Man to Man mental health peer support group, which launched in November 2017. The group meets every Friday at 3 p.m. at CFY’s Outreach and Youth Services Centre on Carter’s Hill.
“Having a whole roomful of people, that the purpose of being there is talking about mental health, and supporting one another, and sharing your own experiences, to help each other — that doesn’t happen in our society very often,” Harvey said.
“I think that’s kind of what Bell Let’s Talk is about. It’s about, ‘Yeah, let’s talk about it.’ Let’s create spaces, let’s tweet about it, let’s help support each other, and so I think that the spirit of that really does translate into the group.”
Harvey says the group is only on its eighth weekly session, but he has already seen it have a positive effect. He says for the participants to have a space to speak plainly about their daily lives is important, and there has been a huge demand for it.
Referring to last week’s session, Harvey said the things they talked about were “real,” and not “experts downloading information onto people.”
“Sharing what it’s like to be in the Waterford, sharing what it’s like to feel discriminated against because of mental illness, and one of the best things that I thought came out of it was the way they were talking about it. It was so normalizing.”
Another St. John’s organization, Stella’s Circle, received funding last year from the Bell Let’s Talk Community Fund to train five staff in horticulture therapy and to deliver three horticulture therapy groups per year.
The organization is creating a community garden and developing indoor garden space to provide participants with the therapeutic opportunity to develop new skills.
Bell Let’s Talk is accepting applications for the 2018 grants until March 31 through its website at letstalk.bell.ca.
