Job Description
Job Title: Call Auntie Clinic (CAC) Community Health Worker
Salary: $28 – $31/hour – based on qualifications and experience
Hours: 40 hrs/week (1.0 FTE), flexible schedule, mostly daytime hours, occasional evening or weekend hours
Location: Call Auntie Clinic at SGMT – 525 Dundas St E, occasional work from home, client home visits and accompaniment to appointments
Start: Immediate start – contract ending March 2025. **Extension contingent on funding.
Background:
Call Auntie is an urban Indigenous-led not-for-profit organization strengthening the health and wellbeing of the Toronto Indigenous Community by providing low barrier access to culturally safe health care, information, and referrals, to Indigenous Community Health Workers, Midwives, Doctors and Nurse Practitioners. With a strong focus on sexual and reproductive health, and wrap-around support, Call Auntie draws upon Indigenous extended kinship systems of support to promote self-determination and fiercely advocate for family integrity throughout all our programs.
The active partnerships that Call Auntie maintains provides us with clinical service providers, supplies, referral pathways, space, and everything that makes what we do possible! This includes but not limited to; Seventh Generation Midwives Toronto, Toronto Birth Centre, Positive Pregnancy Program (P3), Inner City Health Associates Indigenous Program, Auduzhe Mino Nesewinong.
Role Description:
The CAC Community Health Worker will provide a mix of transitional and episodic direct support to individuals and families accessing care at Call Auntie Clinic using a client-centered model of Indigenous approaches to harm reduction, community building and community based supports. You will support the logistics and growth of culturally safe mental health activities offered by Call Auntie. In addition, you may carry a small caseload of clients seeking mental health and addictions services using your skills to facilitate access, navigate, advocate, and appropriately refer clients to health and social services to address client identified priorities. In this role you will be supporting Indigenous people who are:
- Using different types of substances with varying degrees of access to support and safe supply, who may be experiencing houselessness or are street involved
- Seeking culturally safe mental health care, including addictions support
- Navigating parenting supports, including child protection involvement
- Facing challenges and barriers to consistent and reliable forms of safe communication, health care, community support, encouragement and love
Roles and Responsibilities:
- Provide direct one on one mental, emotional and spiritual support
- Facilitate access to health care and other community services through accompaniment, navigation, and advocacy
- Critical thinking and problem solving skills as it relates to addressing specific and individual barriers that program participants may face
- Participate in meetings, case reviews, case conferences
- Knowledge translation and skill sharing about mental health and addictions
- Maintain client confidentiality and privacy aligned with PHIPPA requirements and understand how circle of care functions within an interdisciplinary team
- Promote client self-determination and model healthy interpersonal relationships including taking responsibility for active and flexible care coordination creating a supportive environment for problem solving, care coordination
- Participate in on going self-reflective practice as an individual and team, mentorship, interdisciplinary case reviews, teamwork, working in partnership
- Provide logistics and coordinating support to Call Auntie mental health team
- Actively contribute to the encouragement and maintenance of interprofessional collaboration
- Meet where the client is at: in clinic, home visits, at hospital, during programming
- Participate in weekly logistics and functioning of Call Auntie Clinic
- Other responsibilities as determined in collaboration with Call Auntie team
Qualifications
- 3-5 years experience working with Indigenous people, including gender-diverse Indigenous community members (2SLGBTQIA) and urban relatives
- Work and / or lived experience in areas of mental health and/or addictions health access, substance use and/or harm reduction an asset
- Relevant life experience: land based work, cultural reclamation and revitalization, community organizing, harm reduction, activism
- Training or Post Secondary education in associated field an asset, but not required
- Demonstrated knowledge and experience accessing, navigating and advocating in health systems and institutions
- Strong capacity to manage crises, be resourceful, and problem solve
- Excellent interpersonal and communication skills
- Knowledge of Indigenous Harm Reduction Principles and Reproductive Justice
- Emotional readiness and preparedness for vicarious trauma, witnessing and holding space for disclosures about violence, grief and colonization and disconnection from family, language, land and culture
- Ability to build connections to community services related to mental health and addictions support
- Balance of collaboration and independent work skills including self management, initiative and the ability to set work plans with minimal supervision or oversight
- Ability to travel around the city
- Willing to complete a Vulnerable Sector Check
Call Auntie works to create a healthy work environment based on anti-racism and anti-oppression, in line with Indigenous kinship systems, our different Nations teachings and the Ontario Human Rights Code. We encourage Indigenous individuals, all women, Two-Spirit, genderqueer, trans and non-binary individuals to apply, including racialized people, and individuals with disabilities. Accommodations are provided throughout the application process for individuals with disabilities, upon request, please let us know what you may require.
