Renovations are underway at a new home for Atlantic Wellness.

The centre provides free mental health services for youth.

“We’ve been growing steadily as an organization over the last couple of years. In 2022, we launched our Wave of Change Campaign, which was a sustainable funding campaign for five years but also included a capital component in order to move us from our current location to a bit of a bigger space on King Street. So we’ve added new staff, and we have more interns working with us now. And we’re serving more young people in the community than we have before. The time has come to just move to a bigger location to allow us to expand the work that we do,” says Executive Director Andrew Leblanc.

One of the big changes the centre has made is it is now a bilingual organization.

“We have a new therapist on staff who’s working to serve the Francophone population as well. So we have expanded in that sense. We’ve also expanded our internship program. We now take about four or five interns per practicum placement, which allows us to serve more kids in the community. It’s one of the ways that we’re able to keep our costs down as a nonprofit. We can work with students who are looking to do a practicum for the masters in counselling psychology and so then they can provide added services to us in the community for free. We give them a space to do it and supervision and we’re able to expand the amount of youth we reach in the community,” Leblanc adds.

When Atlantic Wellness opened in 2012, it only had two therapists, and was located in a tiny house in Riverview. In 2017, it moved to Moncton, and the team continued to grow.

“Taking care of your mental health is the same as going to a normal doctor, it should be a part of your routine and should be a part of your check-in, just to make sure you’re doing okay. Make sure you’ve learned coping strategies on how you can deal with some of the various experiences are going through in life, especially in the formative years for young people. We’re thrilled to be able to provide the support that they need the help guide them through some of these really meaningful and key milestones in life. To be able to give them the skills that they need to do that. And so we’re very fortunate to To be in a position where the community supports us enough that we can continue to do that and do it for free so that there are no barriers for young people when they’re trying to access the mental health support they need,” Leblanc says.

The new centre on King Street is expected to open in September.