First Peoples Wellness Circle
First Peoples Wellness Circle (FPWC) is an Indigenous-led national not-for-profit dedicated to enhancing the lives of First Peoples in Canada by addressing healing, wellness, and mental wellness barriers. The organization’s purpose is to walk with and support First Peoples and communities to share collective intelligence for healing, peace-making, and living a good life. FPWC’s approach is centred on promoting wellness pathways based on traditional knowledge and culture that supports healing and wellness and fosters a two-eyed seeing approach. FPWC envisions a nation where our First Peoples experience wholistic health and wellness by championing diverse cultural values, beliefs, and practices.
HOPE
A nation where First Peoples and our communities experience wholistic health and wellness, through living our diverse cultural values, beliefs, and practices.
BELONGING
We are all connected; these are the lenses through which we understand our relationships to the communities we serve, the work we do, and the world.
MEANING
The FPWC advocates for collaborative transformative change to create pathways to wellness and whole health for First Peoples shaped by diverse Indigenous cultural lenses.
Purpose
To walk with and support First Peoples and communities to share collective intelligence for healing, peace-making, and to live a good life.
NEWS
Training and Events Calendar
First People’s Wellness Circle aims to offer Mental Wellness and Crisis Response Teams access to relevant curriculum that is based on Indigenous Knowledge and Ways of Knowing while using a Two-Eyed Seeing Approach.
Training offered is based on the First Nation Mental Wellness Continuum Framework and topics are determined by needs identified through;
- The Mental Wellness Teams Comprehensive Needs Assessment,
- Individual team requests,
- Completed workforce surveys,
- Working groups discussions, and
- Regional Advisory Committees meetings.
We offer a variety of training throughout the year. Some of the training includes: 1-3 hour webinars with subject matter experts, 2-3 day training sessions which include certificates of participation or certification and some week long train-the-trainers with partner organizations.
If you have identified a training need for your team please contact us. We would be happy to discuss how we could help.
Knowledge Exchange & Resource Sharing Circle
In 2018, First Peoples Wellness Circle began a comprehensive needs assessment of all the new and existing Mental Wellness Teams. The goal was to determine needs related to capacity, governance, infrastructure, training, networking, evaluation and defining practice-based evidence. The needs assessment provided the basis for a national strategy outlining a suite of comprehensive supports to be able to support the effectiveness of MWT’s and their implementation of the First Nation Mental Wellness Continuum Framework. Throughout this comprehensive needs assessment, MWTs thoughtfully expressed a range of realistic needs which reflect their unique service requirements.
One of the recommendations identified as a critical component to knowledge exchange and sharing was the creation of a web-based platform for information exchange specifically for the MWT workforce. It was important that the development of such a platform was an easily accessible, custom curated website where MWT’s can share policies, resources, training opportunities and information and research about best practices. Based on this recommendation, FPWC is currently in the early stages of developing our Knowledge Sharing & Resource Circle which will include all of the above important suggestions and will be accessible by and support the Mental Wellness & Crisis Response Teams across the country.