Helping Skills

Canadian Mental Health Association, Newfoundland and Labrador Division

The Helping Skills project grew out of a participatory research project conducted by the CMHA Newfoundland and Labrador Division that explored the impact of the northern cod moratorium on peoples’ well-being. The research showed that although there was a great deal of innate strength and resiliency in the communities, there was also significant distress resulting from loss of employment, and, in particular, loss of a traditional way of life.

Community members expressed great concern about the lack of helping services available to people in rural areas, and about the erosion of social support resulting from the tensions and changes caused by the moratorium.

During the same period, the provincial health system was undergoing restructuring, with the establishment of Regional Community Health Boards responsible for health promotion, as well as mental health and addictions services, among other things. The priorities in this restructuring included encouraging greater community participation, and developing partnerships between the formal and informal sectors to address health needs.

The Community Health Boards charged with the responsibility to implement this mandate were, however, seriously under-resourced. Regional co-ordinators were reporting social and emotional distress to which they had no means of responding. Affordable counselling services were desperately lacking, and virtually non-existent in many rural areas. The priest, the family doctor and the public health nurse were the local over-stretched resources, and people were waiting for up to a year to see psychiatrists and other mental health professionals.

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Summary

The Helping Skills project addressed both the need to develop alternative support networks and the need to build partnerships. Local service providers recognized that the distress that people were experiencing was a result of their loss of employment and way of life, not because of any psychiatric concern. Therefore, the goal of the project was to create a new helping resource - a non-service oriented approach that drew on the strengths and capacities of local people to support each other through hard times.

The Helping Skills project proposed to train a network of volunteers in the essential skills of helping. Once they were trained, they would be a resource for people who needed understanding, support and a confidential listening ear.

The Helping Skills project formed partnerships with two Community Health Boards to create a train-the-trainer program. Counsellors (or service providers) in rural areas would be trained as facilitators, and would in turn deliver the program to volunteers in their communities.

The project was built upon the following key assumptions:

1. there were people in communities who possessed the motivation and innate capacity to help others;
2. with training these people could develop and enhance their helping skills;
3. the training would contribute to building informal helping capacity in communities:
4. by referring people to the network of volunteer helpers, counsellors would become more available to respond to people in psychiatric distress who really needed professional help.

The training would make a clear distinction between the activity of "helping" and that of "counselling" or professional therapy, and enable helpers to identify their own limits and the situations where additional support was required.

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Goals

• to create a model for developing informal helping resources;
• to build partnerships between formal and informal sectors in the area of mental health;
• to increase the knowledge, skills and involvement of community members to support their peers and address the health needs of their communities.

Objectives

• to develop and pilot a "train the trainer" program for service providers to facilitate the learning of effective helping skills by community volunteers;
• to establish a corps of trainers and volunteer helpers with the skills to appropriately refer or otherwise assist people with emotional or social needs;
• to use and teach others how to use a mentoring model to transfer learned skills in areas such as active listening, empathy and setting boundaries.

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Process

The project was designed to unfold in three phases of six months each. A brief explanation of each phase follows.

Phase I : ‘Train-the-trainers"

In the first six months, CMHA staff made contact with the community Mental Health Coordinators and looked for candidates from partner agencies in the region. The agencies were asked to commit a portion of their employees’ time to the project. The potential trainers were asked about the kind of training they felt they needed in order to adequately prepare volunteers to be peer helpers. Based on these discussions, a consultant went on to design a training program.

The twelve trainers then spent ten days working full time with the consultant, learning about how to teach helping skills. The training focused on drawing out the participants’ first hand knowledge of what it means to be helpful and to be helped. Based on this process, a Facilitator’s Manual was written to provide a comprehensive "road map" for the training.

When they returned to their regions, the trainers spent up to two months promoting the program and recruiting interested and appropriate people from the community to become volunteer helpers.

Phase 2: "Transferring the Skills"

During the second six-month period, the trainers focused on transferring skills to the volunteers within their area. This was accomplished through 20 weekly group sessions, using the teaching and mentoring methods they themselves had learned with the consultant in Phase I. Monthly teleconferences provided a forum for sharing progress and problem solving among the trainers. The consultant also visited each site to meet with the volunteer groups. In the final month of Phase 2, the ten trainers spent three days with the consultant evaluating the training process and planning ahead to monitor and maintain the helping network.

Phase 3: "The Network in Action"

In the final six months, the volunteer helpers put their learning to use in their own communities. Some received referrals from various sources such as health professionals and people who referred themselves, while others simply used their new skills informally in their own lives and relationships. Throughout the duration of the project, the consultant was always available for problem solving and guidance. At the end of the third phase, an independent evaluator assessed the effectiveness of the skill transfer process.

This led to the development of Phase 4, program and training manuals were revised to reflect the learnings of the project so far. A few changes were made to the language used in the manual, so that it reflected a more informal approach: "trainers" became "facilitators", and "peer counsellors" became "volunteer helpers".

During this time, staff also focused on promoting the project more widely, and delivering the revised facilitator training to people from other health regions.

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Partners

One of the main goals of the project was to build active partnerships between the formal and informal sectors of mental health. To accomplish this, the co-operation of agencies in the areas of health and social services was enlisted, and a portion of selected employees’ time was dedicated to being community trainers of volunteer helpers.

Sources

Building Helping Skills: Project proposal. Buchan, M. CMHA Newfoundland & Labrador Division, St John’s: September, 1995.

Building Helping Skills. Concluding reflections: What we learned. Buchan, M. CMHA Newfoundland & Labrador Division, St. John’s: 1997.

Helping Skills: Facilitator’s Manual. McConnel, S., and MacLeod, L. CMHA, Newfoundland and Labrador Division. 1998.

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