Mental Health on campus ... and the access to the funding to provide it.
Two college presidents are requesting change on how the Alberta Government distributes funding for mental health initiatives to post-secondary schools.
Joel Ward president and CEO of Red Deer College and chair of the Comprehensive Community Institutions (CCI) and Portage College president and CEO Trent Keough, are both advocating a change in the distribution of mental health funds saying the current process favours larger schools in urban areas.
The issue dates back to September 2016, when the Alberta Government invested $3.6 million to support mental health programming and student outreach services at post-secondary school campuses.
From 2013 to 2016 Most of the funding went towards the University of Alberta, Lethbridge, Calgary and the Alberta Student’ s Executive Council (ASEC), a non-profit student advocacy organization.
Ward and his fellow CCI members-a group consisting of 11 college presidents in Alberta-said they were “very pleased” to hear that the government was funding $3.6 million, but the distribution of the $3.6 million appeared to be scarce among rural or isolated colleges.
Ward said was the one who brought the issue to the CCI convincing the group that there is an issue with the way the funds have been distributed.
“We have recorded a significant increase throughout our college’ s eight locations who are in need of wrap around supports,” Keough said. “Our challenge is that our demands are well beyond our physical capacity.”
Ward wrote a letter on behalf of CCI to Minister of Advanced Education Marlin Schmidt on Nov. 29, requesting that the government find a better means to distribute the funds to schools, so that none are left unfunded.
“He convinced us that there was a real issue here with a discrepancy between the funding to universities and the big cities and the lack of funding for these issues in rural areas,” Ward said. “That was the genesis of the letter I wrote on behalf of (CCI).”
With most of the funding going towards the three major universities, ASEC was one of the few organizations that rural colleges could receive money from.
ASEC distributed the funding to Student Association (SA) members, through grants under Alberta Campus Mental Health Innovation (ACMHI). SAs with a full ASEC membership could submit an application for $40,000 grant, while probation members could apply for $20,000.
The application would then be reviewed by a panel of mental health experts a reward the funding based on the applications content, quality and comprehensiveness of their strategy.
The issue that Ward noted, is that not all SAs are members or belong to ASEC and if the government is disturbing funds to ASEC then non-members would be at a disadvantage. Currently there are only 14 SAs who are members with ASEC.
“We are only responsible to the Student Associations that are part of our membership,” said project ASEC manager Jessica Turowski. “There’ s different ways of communicating and different ways to work together already established. We wouldn’ t have the capacity to offer grants to student association’ s outside our membership.”
Ward added that applying for the government grants became “more of a competition” among SAs in the province.
“If you had initiative you could apply to the funding,” he said. “Some institutions are better at doing that and more organized at doing that in terms of the Student Associations.”
Portage College’ s SA joined ASEC in 2016 and applied for a grant from ACHMI to help support their mental health initiatives, which they were rewarded $20,000.
However, president of the SA Meghan Eigler, said they had to turn down the grant, worth approximately $20,000, after coming to a combined agreement that the organizations was not able to sustain the various projects.
“We were not able to sustain that proposal long term,” she said. “The Students Association is in the process of a rebuilding the foundation of the organization in order to sustain any kind of proposals going forward.”
“We didn’ t have much time to do the proposal,” she added. “So we didn’ t have enough time to consult with partners we wanted to have committed (to continue) project in the future.”
She added that the SA will apply for more mental health grants once they complete their strategic planning.
Keough added that the funds received by the government were restricted and could only be spent through the SA, noting that Portage College’ s administration was not able to assist the SA.
“While there was opportunity there, it was really a lost opportunity,” Keough said. “Our student’ s association made a good business decision...but they weren’ t able to reach out to my professionals and partner together.”
Press Secretary of Advanced Education Benjamin Lof said the Alberta Government has created an advisory panel to find better ways of distributing funding for mental health initiatives to post-secondary institutions.
“We’ ve given them the mandate on how we can improve mental health supports and delivery on all our campuses,” Lof said. “I believe there’ s a particular focus on both rural and other vulnerable populations that have been harder to reach supports. This has been a huge priority for our minister and advanced education as well.”
He added Advanced Education’ s current post-secondary mental health grants will terminate on July 30 2017. Lof said the advisory panel will present their ideas sometime this spring after the budget is announced.
