Prior work · built, funded, handed on
Connections
A way for young people leaving child welfare to find mental health providers who will actually see them.
The gap it closed
Support ends at the moment it's needed most.
Young people in care are surrounded by professionals. Then they age out, and the surrounding stops — often abruptly, and usually just as they're taking on more than they ever have. Mental health support is one of the first things to go: no longer arranged for them, expensive to arrange for themselves, and hard to find from providers with the right experience and open capacity.
The shortage isn't only of money. It's of clinicians who work with this population, who have room, and who can be found by someone who has never had to look before.
What it does
A registry, and the relationships behind it.
Connections maintains a registry of vetted mental health providers who have agreed to take young adults transitioning out of child welfare, and connects young people to them. Providers sign up. Young people are matched. The program holds the middle — the part that otherwise nobody owns.
It is run in partnership with the Children's Aid Society of Toronto, and it is still running today.
Visit the Connections program site →
Connections has its own site and its own team. This page is We Know's account of how it came to be, not the program's front door — if you're a young person or a provider looking for the program itself, the link above is the right place.
What We Know did
Seeded it, funded it through proof, then stepped back.
We Know and the Children's Aid Foundation built Connections together. We put in the early money — the kind that has to be committed before there is any evidence, when a program is an argument rather than a result — and stayed through the years it took to become one.
Once it worked, and could be shown to work, larger funders took it on. That was always the intention. The measure of success was that it no longer needed us.
Built
Designed with the Children's Aid Foundation, who knew the population and the providers.
Funded
Carried through proof of concept, the years when a program has no track record to point to.
Handed on
Passed to larger funders once it could stand. Still running, without us.
Why it's on this site
It's the reason to believe the next one.
The residential program we're designing now is an argument, not yet a result — the same position Connections was in at the start.
Connections is what we point to instead of a promise. It is also load-bearing for the new program in a literal sense: the clinical layer underneath the residence runs through the infrastructure Connections built. We're not starting that part from nothing.
See what we're building nowWe Know Foundation · Registered Canadian charity · Toronto