'Uy' skweyul siem. It means “Good day, respected ones” in Hul'q'umi'num.
My name is Gordon Matchett and I use the he/them pronouns.
Today I'm Zooming in from downtown Vancouver. I'm surrounded by the beauty of the Salish Sea and the North Shore mountains. It's the traditional home of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil Waututh people since time immemorial.
Land acknowledgements are so important to us at Take a Hike because one-third of the women and girls we serve self-identify as indigenous. It's one of the more visible parts of our organization's commitment to reconciliation and helping young indigenous people find success, however they define it.
Right now I'm thinking about Kishi. She's a young indigenous woman who found herself in Take a Hike because she was masking the pain of intergenerational trauma with substances and skipping school. In Take a Hike, Kishi found a safe and caring environment with safe and predictable adults who were able to form relationships with her, improve her connection to school and find healthy ways to cope with what is happening in her life. Today Kishi is working as a support worker in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver, which is the epicentre of B.C.'s homelessness and opioid crises.
Kim is a trans youth who's in their second year of Take a Hike. Kim was assigned female at birth and, like about 10% of the youth we serve, is questioning their gender identity. Kim used to face bullying in their previous school and constantly fought with their family. There was really no place they felt safe. In Take a Hike, they found adults who provided continuity of care for both Kim and their family. Last year, they were able to rebuild the relationship with their family and for the first time found community at school. We're so happy to be able to provide this continuity of care for Kim, so that they are able to continue the good work they started last year.
Kishi and Kim are just two of the young women we've worked with at Take a Hike. Their struggles and successes are reflective of the overall population we serve.
Over the years, we've seen an increasing number of young women attend the Take a Hike program. They present with a variety of mental health and substance use concerns. The women we're working with this year are presenting with eating disorders; self-harm, including cutting and hair-pulling; very high and debilitating anxiety and mood disorders; intense gender dysphoria and expressions of themselves leading to debilitating anxiety; and negative impacts from their online reality. They're internalizing the “norm” of oversexualization and we're seeing a great deal of body image concerns.
We're also seeing mental health disorder self-diagnoses becoming a major part of the young women's identities and lives. As they seek to live out these self-diagnoses, it becomes increasingly difficult to shift the manifestation of the diagnosis.
What we're hearing from the young women and girls we serve is that they want mental health services delivered right in their schools, where it reduces barriers related to stigma, availability, affordability, transportation, the inability to build relationships with a new counsellor, and continually being bounced between counsellors.
Take a Hike is a unique, innovative and evidence-based program that partners with public school districts in B.C. to identify underserved youth and provide mental health services embedded right in the classroom. We use the outdoors to build relationships, engage with youth, and learn on and from the land. Therapy happens in the classrooms, on the basketball court and on the hiking trail, and it's normalized.
School districts provide everything that they are provincially mandated to deliver. Take a Hike layers on top mental health supports and covers the costs of outdoor activities. These things are above and beyond the mandate of the public school system.
Take a Hike has seen some incredible success over the last 22 years. In the last three years, we've more than tripled the reach of the organization. We're now serving 220 youth in multiple regions of B.C. In the 2020-21 school year, at the height of the pandemic and the last year that we have results for so far, we saw 75% of the youth we serve improve their mental health. I'm super impressed because I know my mental health did not improve during that time.
Take a Hike is poised to grow at an exponential rate. One barrier to growth we are experiencing is accessing government funding. As an innovative program, we don't fit into any of the traditional government funding options. We're continually bounced between ministries and jurisdictions. We know that there are not enough mental health commissions in our country to meet the increasing demands of the mental health crisis.
Thank you for the opportunity today to share the mental health challenges we're observing in the young women and girls we serve, the barriers to accessing support and our innovative model of serving youth. We encourage you to find ways that the government can support innovative and evidence-based programs that remove barriers and help young women and girls improve their mental health.
Thank you.