Project Resilience extends reach to The Pas

A Brandon-based peer support network for first responders and front-line workers is expanding to The Pas as part of its mission to make its services equally accessible across the province.

“We know that being in northern Manitoba provides its own unique circumstances with accessing resources when needed and having those resources readily available,” Brandon Police Service Const. Amanda Conway, co-founder of Project Resilience 911, told the Sun.

“The purpose of this is having it so that the resources will be local to the area and available.”

Conway described the non-profit as a “multi-agency, peer support and mental-health initiative” for first responders and anyone working in a career where they experience trauma.

The Pas fire Chief Byron Shangraw said supporting the mental health and longevity of his crew is a top priority, and welcomed the expansion.

“I think it’s great to have something like this in the northern communities,” Shangraw said. “Up north, we’re quite a ways away from anything. So, if we need major mental-health help from the Officer of the Fire Commissioner or anything down in Winnipeg, it’s at minimum six hours.

“So, having that peer support locally, we’re here within 10 minutes of each other. So, any major event, we can help each other out.”

Project Resilience was founded in 2020 after Conway and a member of the Blue Hills RCMP got together to brainstorm ways to bring more awareness to first responders’ mental health and break down the stigma around it.

When Conway became a member of the Brandon Police Service 10 years ago, she said she was lucky they already had a peer support employee wellness team, but that’s not the case for all agencies.

“A lot of other agencies didn’t or still don’t (have one), and if they did, they weren’t receiving a lot of funding opportunities to educate and bring awareness.”

Through Project Resilience, Conway said she was able to apply for grant funding and put on special events to raise money and provide education that is accessible to agencies whether they have the budget to access mental health resources or not.

Project Resilience started locally, providing services in Brandon and Shilo. A couple years ago, Conway said she secured more funding, allowing the non-profit to expand to southern Manitoba and “really push on to provide some education to rural fire services.”

While she said they have never turned down a request for service, Project Resilience is now formally expanding to The Pas so they can service more of the province’s northern communities.

Conway and a couple of other Project Resilience members travelled to The Pas to do mental-health training with rural fire services, and The Pas Fire Department later asked them to come back.

Grady Stephenson, who is the former deputy chief of the Carberry and North Cypress-Langford Fire Department and has been involved with Project Resilience for a couple of years, went back to provide further education last fall.

“Once he did that, one of their fire service members … asked how they could become involved with Project Resilience and how we could get something started to provide better services to the North when it comes to mental health for first responders.”

In January, members of Project Resilience held a two-day peer and trauma support systems training in The Pas.

Conway said there will eventually be a “core group of peers” with formal education in mental health that will be stationed there.

“We’re still going to probably run into some challenges with providing specific services or specific resources, but we’re definitely going to be working on it and trying to recruit clinicians to also work with us up in that area.”

Shangraw, who has been a firefighter for 12 years and the fire chief for around two, said the two-day training in January brought together members of the RCMP, emergency medical services, First Nations police, the Opaskwayak Cree Nation Fire Department, Manitoba Corrections and the Rural Municipality of Kelsey.

He was initially worried they wouldn’t meet the minimum requirement of 20 people, but more than 40 showed up for the training.

Later this year, he said, they are looking at doing provincewide training on suicide prevention, critical incident stress management and advanced training.

He emphasized the importance of first responders talking to one another and getting “everything out.”

“Boarding it up and keeping it inside, it ends up building up, and then we end up with a high rate of suicide … We don’t want to see that happen anywhere, whether it’s corrections, EMS, RCMP, fire — we want to try to help prevent that.”

The Pas Mayor Andre Murphy said the town’s council and community support the expansion of Project Resilience 100 per cent.

“I think it’s an absolute awesome support system that this group has created,” Murphy said.

Being a first responder usually comes with a lot of stress that regular citizens may not realize, Murphy said, and having a support network not only helps the first responders, but also their families and the community.

“Healthy people usually continue to serve in the roles that they do and if this can help them, it sort of helps everybody maintain the level of service that … we need,” he said.

Murphy said many people in the community look up to first responders, and when they speak out about mental health, it breaks down barriers and shows people they don’t have to “battle through it on their own.”

» sanderson@brandonsun.com