Last year, the Improving Treatment Together (ITT) Project released Parents Like Us: The Unofficial Survival Guide to Parenting a Young Person with a Substance Use Disorder. The handbook helps families navigate the complexities of parenting a young person with a substance use disorder and improve their access to community-based services.
The handbook was created by a group of 12 parents in Victoria, B.C., in partnership with the Canadian Centre on Substance Use and Addiction (CCSA), Foundry Central Office and Foundry Victoria, as part of the ITT Project.
The original Parents Like Us focuses on resources specifically for families in Victoria. But CCSA saw it as a template for a national resource, and we wanted to spread the reach of this type of resource to other communities in Canada. As a pilot project, we partnered with the Sault Ste. Marie Hospital to adapt this handbook for the needs of caregivers in their Ontario region.
Using the experiences and lessons learned while working with parents and caregivers in Victoria and Sault Ste Marie as a guide, CCSA developed the Adaptation Toolkit: Co-creating a Local Resource with Caregivers Supporting a Young Person with Substance Use Disorder. The toolkit offers communities the processes, considerations and resources they need to create their own adapted version of the handbook.
The toolkit is intended for professionals, caregivers and caregiver allies who want to create their own version of the Parents Like Us handbook in their communities with families and caregivers leading the process.
We hope you find these resources useful, and we encourage you to share them with your networks.
If you have any questions about the resources, please email CCSA Knowledge Broker Christina Katan at ckatan@ccsa.ca.
