The Vancouver Island Counselling Centre for Immigrants and Refugees is well-attuned to world events.
Three years ago, the centre began preparing for an influx of Ukrainian newcomers as soon as it heard of war breaking out, said centre co-founder Adrienne Carter.
“The country and B.C. were not prepared for the Ukrainians coming. We already trained the ambassadors. We had our interpreters ready.”
It was the same case with Afghanistan when the Taliban took over, she said. “Now, we’re waiting for when the war in Gaza ends.”
Formed in 2015 by a group of five looking to provide mental-health support to refugees fleeing Syria, the organization has since grown into into a full-fledged counselling centre offering services in 30 languages.
The centre also provides non-counselling social ambassadors and volunteers who help with other issues such as immigration and citizenship paperwork, Carter said. “The holistic wrap-around service is very important here.”
After years of working out of a local church, the office has moved to downtown Victoria.
“We started from nothing. We had no money,” Carter said. “The church charged us $1,000 a month and that was our biggest expenditure.”
Today, the centre employs more than 60 counselling clinicians and clinically trained interpreters who are paired together.
“They work together during the entire counselling journey. We do not change interpreters between sessions,” Carter said.
Soraya Centeno, the centre’s clinical services director, said the method builds much-needed familiarity for people who may be opening up about their traumas for the first time.
“They’ve gone through a lot. They’re not going to open up in [just] two sessions,” she said.
Centeno said the centre, which receives funding from the provincial government’s Community Prosperity Fund via the Victoria Foundation’s Community Grants Program, has provided 25,000 hours of counselling to newcomers since it was established.
Sometimes clients, who are initially focused on settlement, come back for additional sessions years later.
“Just even the fact that our clients feel free to come back for more therapy is extremely important,” Carter said.
Centeno said its a mark of trust when a single counselling referral for a child leads to the centre helping out the entire family — which was the case for one refugee family of seven from Afghanistan.
It’s a resource-intensive model, but it’s seen a lot of success, she said. “The data actually shows that the model is working.”
The centre’s approach has caught the eye of larger settlement organizations in Vancouver and it’s preparing to publish research to back up its claims, she said.
Centeno, herself an immigrant from Madrid, Spain, said she quit a lucrative career in consulting to focus on helping newcomers in their journey.
She doesn’t make as much at the centre as she could make elsewhere, Centeno said. “But you know what? I’m growing rich in the heart.
“Every time you meet with some of these clients, you really are growing and you’re learning from them,” she said. “They have so much to offer.”
