Youth Wellness Champions
Sometimes we all need a little help from friends. This is especially true for youth in terms of their mental health and well-being. Good mental health is important for everyone, including youth.
Mental health, illness and substance use among youth is a very serious issue. The good news is that peer-support-based interventions such as the Registered Nurses’ Association of Ontario (RNAO) Youth Wellness Champions (YWC) program help find solutions.
Whether you’re an adult or a youth seeking to pave a brighter future for other young Canadians, our YWC Toolkit will help you be better informed, inspired and most important of all, involved in helping to create supportive, inclusive and resilient communities.
The Youth Wellness Champions Program (YWC Program) is an innovative, peer-based program based on youth engagement principles, designed to help youth develop the knowledge and skills they need to cope with mental health and substance use issues.
This work is funded by the Government of Ontario. All work produced by RNAO is editorially independent from its funding source.
Get started
The Youth Wellness Champions (YWC) Implementation Journey is a free, online, open-access evidence-informed implementation model and resource. It focuses on the uptake and sustainability of knowledge – or evidence. Informed by RNAO’s Leading Change Toolkit, the YWC Implementation Journey uses two complementary frameworks to help you accelerate your success – the Social Movement Action and Knowledge-To-Action Frameworks.
YWC is a multi-partner model, which means that getting started requires:
- the buy in of local public health units and school boards/schools
- identification of local participants for key roles on an implementation team
- identifying community partners who can have a major influence on your program’s success and recruitment of youth champions to help with the program.
Teamwork is the foundation of the YWC Program success. In particular, there are four integral roles in the program:
- Public Health Lead
- Mental Health Lead
- School Staff Lead
- Youth Champions
Making change happen involves using innovative strategies to support prepare to build leadership capacity in Youth Champions and the Adult Allies that support them in making change.
An evaluation plan is an important step in program planning and implementation. Ensuring a thorough evaluation also helps learning what works and what opportunities lie ahead, to ensure YWC program sustainability.
Why Youth Wellness Champions (YWC)?
- Creating supportive and inclusive environments
- Strengthening youth and adult ally partnership inpromoting mental health
- Increasing mental health literacy
- It's free!
Buy-In
The YWC Program aligns with all five of the foundations in the Foundations for a Healthy School approach as well as the Ontario Curriculum. It is youth-led and encourages students to be active participants and contributors to their learning and understanding of mental health promotion. Students learn about mental health, mental illness, and substance use and are better equipped to support their peers.
Our partners
Our Impact
"We are thrilled with the positive reception we had with YWC in the community. The flexibility and customizability of the program not only supported our partners to increase youths’ knowledge of mental health and substance use health but also was a pathway to further engagement with community services”
- Health Care Worker
“Even small things can mean something big”
- Student Champion
“The school community, where each student feels like they belong”
- Teacher Champion
