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 ...
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