Isolated Newfoundland communities have historically been extraordinarily resourceful in dealing with their own human problems and survival issues. Helping skills, indeed, are natural human abilities possessed by many individuals and readily recognized by those who turn to them for support.

In recent decades, however, such skills have been defined and taught by such professions as social work, psychology and nursing, and developed to a high level of sophistication by psychotherapists and counsellors.

The "professionalization" of helping and the placing of ultimate trust in the expert has in many ways undermined the role of informal resources. A certain mystique about professional counselling has developed, so that many people have lost confidence in their own abilities to help friends and neighbours when they are going through difficult times.

In situations of emotional stress such as that caused by the cod moratorium, people tend to feel that informal help is inadequate and that professional counselling is needed. In rural Newfoundland, the changes to the health care system and the difficulty in accessing services were added causes of anxiety.

The Helping Skills project participants addressed this situation and the impact it was having on their communities by taking a capacity building approach. Key to their involvement was their first-hand knowledge of the needs and scarcity of resources in their communities. They engaged in a learning process that challenged them to deconstruct assumptions about helping, and incorporated their experiential knowledge of what’s helpful and what isn’t.

The Helping Skills project made participants more aware of the resources that they already had, rather than pointing out areas of need. They learned that, rather than mental health services, listening skills and friendly support were most helpful resources that they could offer to others in distress.