After spending half her childhood in foster care, group homes and with relatives, Alisha Brooks ended up back with her mother at age 14, where she grew angry and troubled.

“There were no supports in place to help me transition out of care,” says Brooks, 28, who desperately wanted to go home and lied to children’s aid about her mother’s continuing struggles to avoid being taken into care again.

“I was not equipped for life in downtown Toronto and a neighbourhood with gangs and violence that I had never seen before,” she says.

The young woman’s anger soon boiled into resentment and a string of school suspensions for fighting, an unplanned pregnancy and teen motherhood.

At age 24, after losing a boyfriend to gun violence, a friend told her about the Pape Adolescent Resource Centre, or PARC, a haven for youth who have been involved with children’s aid, where Brooks was connected to some long overdue counselling.

“I was a hot mess,” she says in interview. “One minute I was crying and the next I was laughing. It was awful.”

A new $500,000 program being launched this month by the Children’s Aid Foundation of Canada in partnership with the Children’s Aid Society of Toronto, hopes to provide more mental health supports to young people like Brooks.

About 2,500 young people in Toronto between the ages of 18 and 29 are transitioning out of or have already left the care of children’s aid, according to the foundation, which is focused on easing that journey.

Connections, a new mental health hub based at PARC, aims to help about 200 young people a year, says foundation president Valerie McMurtry.

“Our goal is to have as many youth who leave care on the road to employment and education. But we understand mental health issues are a huge barrier to those outcomes,” McMurtry says.

Children and youth in the child welfare system are almost four times as likely to be diagnosed with a mental health disorder compared to their peers in the general population. Childhood trauma related to abuse and neglect often turns into unaddressed mental health challenges that follow them into adulthood, McMurtry says.

Many aren’t ready to seek help until they are in their mid- to late-20s, she says. But that is when provincial funding for support ends, leaving many in urgent need of mental health services unsure of where to go or stuck on long wait lists.

If they connect with adult mental health services, they often lack support to attend appointments or feel wary of trusting someone who was not part of their network while in care, McMurtry says. After missed appointments, their file is closed with no followup.

“Connections is designed to provide a familiar and trusted service to young people formerly from care when they are ready to seek help,” McMurtry says.

The program includes supports such as one-on-one counselling with trauma-focused cognitive behavioural therapists, comprehensive assessments by an in-house primary care physician and psychiatrist at Toronto CAS’s Isabella St. offices, system navigation and referrals to established community-based services.

Art therapy, peer support groups and help with employment, housing and skills building are offered at PARC, located on Pape Ave., in Riverdale.

Program navigator Dimple Bhagat, who will do initial needs assessments with each young person, will help them develop immediate and long-term goals and begin to connect them with the help they need.

“If the client is in need of counselling, we would have them go for an assessment with the psychiatrist or family doctor (at Toronto CAS) to determine the type of therapy they need and then we would connect them to the appropriate service in the community,” Bhagat says. “I would help facilitate that transition into the community and check in with them regularly to make sure they are following the plan.”

If there are problems, Bhagat finds out why. “Maybe they don’t have money to get to their appointments. We have funding for transportation.”

Brooks, who participated in a pilot project for Connections last summer, says it has changed her life.

“I’m so glad a funder has come up with the money for a program like this,” she says. “Getting a referral is very hard and wait times are long. Having a navigator to help you along the way and keep you on track, makes all the difference.”

Through cognitive behavioural therapy, Brooks says she was able to delve back into her childhood and trace the roots of her anger and start to build a responsible adult life.

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“The therapy helped me understand why I was behaving like that. It helped me better understand the whole me,” says Brooks who is about to start a new job as an outreach worker for a mentorship program for other youth leaving care.

“I learned it was OK to blame my mother. But I also learned that it was time for me to take responsibility for things that happened too.”

The program is supported by a major donor, who wishes to remain anonymous, along with Medavie Health Foundation, Bell Let’s Talk and the HBC Foundation.