About Vanier

About Vanier

Southwestern Ontario's leader in children's mental health

Vanier is a leader in helping children and youth age 0 to 14 and their families with  emotional and behavioural issues.  For over 40 years, we have served London and surrounding communities in southwestern Ontario with compassionate, best-practice and innovative programs and services

Our Mission

Vanier helps children to reach their full potential by working with the child and family's unique strengths, needs and culture to prevent or reduce serious mental health problems.

Our Vision

We work with families, professionals and our community to create a caring, emotionally healthy and supportive environment where all children, including the most vulnerable, reach their full potential to lead safe, productive and independent lives.

Vanier is an accredited Children's Mental Health Centre primarily funded by the Ontario Ministry of Children and Youth Services.

Vanier is a proud member of the Pillar Nonprofit Network.

Who we help

Families are our partners. Together, we provide supports to children to increase the likelihood that they will reach their full potential. Vanier works with the whole family's unique strengths, needs and culture.

Many of the children we help are reacting to overwhelming stresses within their lives like death, divorce, violence, neglect, or parents with mental health or substance abuse problems. Some are coping with genetic conditions and problems resulting from parenting.

Vanier's diversity policy

Vanier respects, values and celebrates the diversity of people who make up our community. Our goal is for people of all backgrounds to be able to use our services.

Vanier:

  • strives to recognize and remove barriers to access
  • provides quality services that are sensitive to all kinds of diversity
  • believes in the dignity and worth of individuals inclusive of their gender, ethnicity, race, sexual/affectional orientation, age, physical and mental abilities, religious beliefs and socio-economic status

Interpretation Services

Vanier Children's Services understands how important it is to provide assistance in a family's primary language.  We know that having services delivered using a multilingual approach is the best way to reach many communities needing our help.  However limited we are regarding a multilingual staffing complement, we are committed to providing access to trained interpreters for clinical services.

We recognize the diversity of our employee group and will access their interpretation skills, including sign language, for both clinical and non-clinical work at Vanier where it is appropriate.

Vanier has actively been involved in the provision of bilingual services during the past ten years.  We offer Crisis-Intake services in French, limited group services (when available) and short term family counselling.  We strive to enhance these services in the future.

Occasionally, we have been very fortunate to have Spanish speakers on staff and in our Clinical Training Program.  Whenever possible, we will endeavour to provide first hand crisis-intake and counselling supports in Spanish.  The language capacities of students and interns vary over time in this program.

We access "Accross Languages" Interpretation Services in London to help us with other language groupings.  To date, there have been no charges to consumers for these services.  We identify language needs at the point of access to the agency and then make the necessary arrangements to engage an interpreter for further activities.

What we do

Vanier serves children age 0 to 14 who have serious emotional, mental illness and behavioural problems, and their families. Our programs and services are flexible and responsive to the specific needs of each family.

We offer:

  • Crisis intervention
  • Residential services
  • Day treatment
  • Early years programming and various attachment therapies
  • Family counseling
  • Community outreach
  • Day and overnight respite
  • in-home counselling