The Community Outreach Program is part of the Region of Waterloo’s National Child Benefit program. The program has been operating since 1999. Fifteen community organizations and the Region of Waterloo Social Services sponsor the poverty reduction initiative enhancing individual and family opportunity. The program has outreach workers at 25 locations across Waterloo Region. K-W Counselling Services sponsors 5 outreach workers in partnership with the City of Kitchener and neighbourhood associations. The outreach workers are located at 7 community centre sites in Kitchener. These include Breithaupt Centre, Centreville-Chicopee, Country Hills & Doon Pioneer Park, Mill-Courtland, Victoria-Hills and Paulander Community Centres. The program has five key components, which include direct service (support to individual/family capacity building), community mobilization, capacity building related to groups and systems, partnership building and evaluation.

The Family Outreach Workers spend their time responding to individual and family need first through referrals to existing community agencies and resources. When an existing program, service or resource is not available direct service is provided through either in-kind donations and/or support, or accessing a basic needs fund through the Region of Waterloo.

In addition to ensuring that family’s basic needs are being met, Family Outreach Workers work with families, individuals and groups within the community to build on and develop capacity, emphasizing strengths, and to build new skills. The objective is for the individual/family path to be one that leads to less reliance on the social service system and increased attachment to the workforce.

KW Counselling belongs to a national network of EAP providers (family services employee assistance programs) who provide services to companies and employees of companies located both in Kitchener-Waterloo and across Canada. Services are an employee benefit and include:
*Individual, couple, family counselling
*Group work, for example parenting, anger management and stress management
*at this location
*Critical Incident Stress Management (C.I.S.M.)
*Consultation to management, human resources, and union*
Wellness workshops
*A 1-800 number which provides immediate access to a fully trained counsellor for purposes of intake, crisis intervention, childcare and eldercare information and access to legal consultation.
*Substance Abuse Professional assessments (Department of Transportation regulated)

Service is provided across Canada by 300 other family service agencies as well as by affiliates in places where no family service agency exists.

Family & Community Solutions is K-W Counselling Services’ brand of family life education, a universal preventative service which provides individual, family, group, and community education and development opportunities. Family & Community Solutions’ diverse offerings are available to the Agency’s clients as adjuncts to treatment or to community members at large as stand-alone opportunities for growth.

Family & Community Solutions offers people new ways to understand and deal with the patterns and problems of individual, family, group, and community life that are situational and potentially or actually stress-producing. These patterns include transitional points in life, life stages, role stresses, community living, and shared interests and concerns.

Family & Community Solutions is strengths-based and focused on building supports for the individual, family and enhanced capacity within the community. Family & Community Solutions specializes in:
*educational services for parents
*personal growth and couple enrichment
*professional education
*public and community education

Family & Community Solutions works collaboratively with schools, community centres, neighbourhood associations, churches, multicultural groups, businesses, and other community organizations. It is dynamic, innovative, and attends to the changing demographic and social needs of the community. The programs engage facilitators who have extensive experience, training, and expertise in specific topics and areas of concern

The program is focused on creating services that are inclusive and accessible for newcomers to this region. In 2008, Heritage Canada funding was finished and our outreach capacity went from 5 days per week to one day per week. This allowed us very little capacity for community outreach which is obligatory to engage the diverse community in counselling services.

However, in 2009, a grant to offer Money and Making it On Your Own groups allowed for increased outreach activities.

The next stage of the project proposes to continue to share this experience and expertise with other sectors, such as the for-profit, educational, health, faith communities, arts and culture, local governments etc. The goal is for more staff to become involved to imbed this philosophy of outreach into the essence of K-W Counselling activities.

OK2BME is a set of support services for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or questioning (LGBTQ) kids and teens in Waterloo Region, and their families.
 
These support services include:

*LGBTQ-positive individual and family counselling
*social and recreational groups
*public education
*consultation and collaboration
*help establishing Gay-Straight Alliances and other similar initiatives in local schools

The S.T.E.A.M. Program (Supporting Temper, Emotions and Anger Management) was created and developed in 1999 by K-W Counselling Services in consultation with the Waterloo Region District Catholic School Board. This school-based program is designed to assist elementary school children who have difficulties managing their emotions, and as a result, controlling their behaviors.

It is a proactive, environmental-level intervention response to the behavioral problems identified in schools, and benefits children to become more successful in managing their behaviors at school and at home. Parents, teachers, principals, and community social workers collaborate to help children “identify underlying feelings and thoughts that affect the choices they make”.

This program was the result of detecting an increased need for service from the Spanish speaking population of the KW Region. It was identified that a large part of this population is suffering from immigration, mental health and trauma issues as a result of the political and social turmoil that is happening in their countries of origin.

Developing a Spanish psychotherapy group following an integrated model of Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy, Psycho-education and Brief Psychodynamic was an initial and successful response in order to address the complex needs of some members of this large Spanish speaking population from KW Region.

The rationale of this Spanish psychotherapy group was to use the safety of the group container to provide an opportunity for members to construct and tell their trauma narratives in the presence of witnesses, in their mother tongue in order to give meaning to the trauma and to start the process of mourning in the context of their ethno-cultural supportive environment.

Strong Moms Safe Kids (formerly Bouncing Back) is an early intervention program for children who have witnessed violence at home. A goal of the program is to provide services for the ethno-cultural families that may be experiencing marginalization.
The program provides a group for mothers and their children as they recover from family violence. The group provides time for families to learn about abuse together, and also provides smaller groups for mothers, youth and younger children, so that they can learn more about abuse at an age appropriate level.

The goal of the program is to increase the safety of mother and their children, to support children to tell their stories and understand their rights, feelings and experiences, to support mothers in parenting and supporting their traumatized children while they themselves are recovering from their own experience of trauma.

Any person in the community can encounter life-events or trauma that overwhelm them and exceed their ability to cope. These events include parenting or family/couple conflicts and violence; personal losses through death, divorce, termination of employment; caring for aging parents; and present/past abusive relationships. Research confirms that trauma and loss can result in diminished function. These life events and exposure to trauma also put people at increased risk for depression, anxiety, suicidality, anger, violence, addiction and other losses in capacity

The industry experience and research in delivering fully accessible counselling services demonstrates that 6%-10% of the population will request counselling for trauma related issues in any given year. Currently counselling is available to approximately 4% of the population of Kitchener and Waterloo via the various counselling agencies (as per annual reports). Our own statistics demonstrate that 66% of our clients present with clinically significant mental health issues that left unaddressed cause the potential for involvement with the courts, police, hospitals, attendance counsellors, addictions treatment agencies, women's shelters and children's aid societies

Therapeutic Counselling interventions use clients' strengths and help to increase capacity; people heal from the effects of trauma and use their strengths, resources and abilities to live fulfilling lives.

At KW Counselling Services we are able to deliver short/medium term counselling and single session therapy.

The Walk In Counselling Clinic operates Thursdays from 12:00 - 6:00 pm and clients leave their 1.5 hour session with a written plan that begins addressing their concerns. Clients are asked to work with the plan for a week or more. After that time, if clients think they would benefit from further sessions, they may again attend the Walk-In Counselling Clinic, or they may call to request short/medium term counselling.

The training program involves a placement at KW Counselling Services and consists of three entry periods, including orientation, per year. Entry to the training program occurs the first two weeks of September, January, and May. Orientation involves familiarization with the KW Counselling Orientation Manual which outlines the policies and procedures of our agency. In addition, orientation includes introduction to our computer software Caseworks.

Orientation also focuses on enhancing clinical skills of the interns. We offer introduction to the use of common counselling theories such as Brief Narrative, Solution Focused, and Cognitive Behavioural therapies. Interns are introduced to the basic concepts of Couple Therapy and Family Therapy. Interns are oriented to the Walk-In clinic and are expected to become part of the clinic from the beginning of their Practicum. Dyadic and group supervision are provided on a weekly basis; Regular Peer consultations and frequent Training sessions are also part of Intern experience at KWCS. Interns students see 5 – 12 clients per week depending on their University or personal learning goals. Many students participate in various group experiences through Community Solutions and/or S.T.E.A.M. and other psycho-educational groups offered through KWCS.

Tuning into Trauma and Attachment is a collaborative project offered in partnership with Family and Children’s Service of Waterloo Region. It is a multipronged initiative that adapts existing child welfare placement services (Family Centred Planning, Attachment Consultations, in home interventions) to create an attachment and trauma informed service plan to address the needs of children and caregivers. This service is specifically for bio and foster/kin/adoptive families.

KW Counselling Services plays a coordinating role in this innovative project. Additionally, they are responsible for offering Trauma and Attachment groups as well as individual and dyadic counselling interventions to bio and foster/kin/adoptive families. Counselling goals are often created collaboratively with F&CS case workers and clients to address specific needs in order to support and strengthen the resiliency of family systems.

This project in partnership with Wilfrid Laurier University is supported by research designed to increase the uptake of evidence based practice in the child welfare sector.

*Offers rehabilitative and reintegration programs and services for youth who have been in conflict with the law and have a current probation order
*Provide therapeutic counselling to youth and other family members
*Addressing the issues and supports of young persons with mental health and/or behavioural needs who are in the youth justice system
*Target criminogenic needs which are linked to the probability of re-offending
*Based on cognitive-behavioural principles and interventions, best practices, consultation, evidence-based programming and integrated with other services provided to youth within government and in the community
*Setting collaborative goals for work from the perspective of the young person, probation officer, family members, counselling and others (e.g., schools)
(Services made accessible to youth by offering multiple locations in the community including schools, probation offices and community centres