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Only 1 in 5 Youth With a Mental Health Illness Get Access to The Care They Need
Many families spend months waiting in line for mental health services, only to be informed that they were in the wrong line, forcing them to join another wait list while they struggle to support their child at home.
The RBC Youth Mental Well-being Project is our commitment to support programs that help youth and families access the right care at the right time.
What We Fund
Navigation Programs and Technology-based Solutions
We fund programs that address youth and family’s immediate need to access mental health services, a critical area identified by parents, youth and experts in the field.
We have chosen to focus our funding on two areas where we believe our support can make the biggest difference:
Other programs
We will also consider supporting other programs that increase access to care if they are collaborative, have proven results and can demonstrate successful outcomes. We will prioritize granting for programs that increase collaboration across service providers to reduce fragmentation.
Our hope is that our funding will help achieve integration not just within the mental health system, but between the mental health and general health systems. We also prefer to fund programs that do not duplicate services provided by other organizations.
Additional Resources
The Application Process
To be considered for an RBC Youth Mental Well-being Project grant, your organization must be a registered charitable organization with the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA), or a CRA-qualified donee operating in Canada, and have audited financial statements.
Prior to starting your online application, please review the RBC general donations eligibility criteria
To complete your online application, click on the “apply now” button below. You will be asked to log in, or register for, our online application system to proceed. Please note we require 90 days to review your application.
Please Note: The Youth Mental Well-being participant survey is required for those who received a grant from April 1st, 2016 to March 31st, 2017. Those organizations that received a grant on and after April 1st, 2017 are not required to complete the survey portion of our evaluation requirements. The participant survey was launched as a 1 year pilot and we are taking a break to evaluate the results from Year 1.
For questions related to your application or the RBC Youth Mental Well-being Project please contact: ymhproject@rbc.com
Who Can Apply?
RBC will support organizations and programs that:
- Target youth aged 13-24, and where applicable, their families.
- Demonstrate thoughtful and evidence-based or informed program design advised by best practices, successful program models and/or academic evidence and parents/youth with lived experience.
- Provide evidence of success (quantitative and qualitative) that indicate the capability to deliver services and solutions successfully.
- Demonstrate how the program is moving the sector forward through multi-stakeholder collaboration.
- Demonstrate how the program is making a concerted effort to increase sector collaboration and reduce fragmentation in the service region and beyond.
- Articulate intended outcomes and metrics aligned to RBC’s intended outcomes.
- Articulate the intended impact of efforts, as well as the metrics by which impact will be measured.
- Include the education of parents, youth and families.
- Are inclusive and meet the needs of diverse populations such as Indigenous youth or immigrants.
Navigation Programs
While discussions about system reform are ongoing in Canada’s Mental Well-being sector, many youth and families are stuck navigating a complex and segregated array of Mental Well-being services. Some youth have spent years being referred in circles, and in some cases, even being referred back to the service where they started.
Navigation programs help solve for these issues by directly connecting youth and families with the Mental Well-being services they need as efficiently as possible. Under the new granting strategy, we will focus on supporting new and existing navigation programs that help ensure youth and families are able to get timely access to the right care.
These programs are offered through a number of different access points, such as hospitals, youth care and community centres, schools and universities. The services may be delivered face to face and/or through technology solutions by licensed social workers, youth or families with lived experience, or clinical experts.
Our commitment to funding navigation programs is a short-term strategy to provide help to those with an immediate need while the sector works to achieve broader, long-term, systemic reform. As such, we will concurrently identify opportunities to support longer-term initiatives that aim to drive broader systemic change.
Technology-based Solutions
In some parts of Canada – particularly rural and northern regions of Canada – there are not enough Mental Well-being service providers to meet demand in local communities. The consequence of these long wait times not only worsens mental illnesses, but also frustrates and overwhelms youth and families.
Technology is increasingly becoming the solution to these issues by increasing remote access to care. Programs that use technologies like email, apps, web-posting, and phone or live/video conferencing help to bridge the gap between supply and demand of Mental Well-being care services. These programs can offer assessments, diagnosis and care that would otherwise be delayed, or not available at all. To be most effective, services delivered through technology need to be integrated, affiliated or supported by community based organizations.