Supporting Ontario’s Consumer/Survivor Initiatives and Their Importance to the Ontario Community Mental Health and Addictions System During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Ontario’s consumer/survivor-governed organizations (CSOs) are critical recovery-oriented community mental health and substance use/abuse sites and services run by and for people with lived experience of the mental health system or what could be referred to as serious mental health problems/diagnoses. They are low/no-barrier, quick-access, no-stigma peer-based services operating on shoestring provincial mental health funding, finding creative ways to work from a critical collective ethic of peer support and mutual aid. As under-resourced organizations, Ontario CSOs face difficult challenges for service data collection and establishing the evidence for their practice and to support their continued independence, autonomy, and funding. This paper presents some of the findings from a small-scale qualitative inquiry about data collection practices and challenges in CSOs, focused on 11 CSO leaders. Because this inquiry was conducted in the first few months of Ontario’s pandemic lockdown, how CSOs were responding to service needs became a significant theme of the research. This paper focuses on some of the findings of this project, highlighting the challenges they face in collecting data that captures their work, and takes this opportunity to share their unique response to the pandemic lockdown. The paper concludes with the need for an approach to data collection that honors their unique nature and a call for social work researchers to return to this sector with participatory action program evaluation to help the sector tell their story and remain a vital part of the community mental health and addictions system in Ontario.