Explore our upcoming courses for what will align with your professional development and learning goals. Be sure to check this page often to keep an eye out for new courses and additional offerings of past courses.
Mental Health and Substance Use – Level 1
- Start date: December 1, 2025
- Format: 100% online, self-paced, instructor-supported with monthly optional real-time sessions
- Duration: Two courses of approximately 30 hours of content each, with six months to complete each course from start date
- Cost: $750 per course, $1,500 for the program
Click HERE to learn more and register
Description:
Frontline workers across various sectors often lack adequate training to effectively support clients with mental health and substance use challenges. This skills gap limits their effectiveness and highlights the need for accessible, targeted training programs for a diverse workforce.
The new UBC Micro-certificate in Mental Health and Substance Use is a part-time, asynchronous, online program designed to provide learners with the foundational knowledge and core skills they need to effectively and ethically engage in frontline service provision to individuals experiencing mental health and substance use challenges in multiple service contexts.
This program was developed by clinicians with many years of experience and expertise in mental health and substance use practice. Consultations with internal and external organizations, including the First Nations House of Learning, further contributed to ensuring that the program provides a relevant, applied, and culturally-informed learning experience.
By the end of the program, you will be able to:
- Identify and assess mental health symptoms and substance use challenges at a foundational level
- Develop foundational skills and strategies for effective and ethical engagement with individuals experiencing mental health and substance use challenges
- Describe and examine the social determinants of mental health and substance use, and methods to support holistic recovery
- Apply trauma-informed, strengths-based, and anti-oppressive approaches to engagement with individuals experiencing mental health and substance use challenges
Systemic Family Therapy: Core skills
Date: March 6, 2026
Time: 9:00 am to 12:00 pm and 1:00 pm to 4:00 pm PST
CEU: 6 hours
Location: Virtual – Zoom sessions
Cost: $180
Click HERE to learn more and register
Audience:
This workshop is ideal for therapists, social workers, and mental health practitioners seeking to enhance their family therapy skills and deepen their understanding of relational dynamics in practice.
Description:
Working from a systemic perspective in family therapy involves attending to the interconnectedness, distinctive patterns and unique dynamics present in each unique relationship and family system. These skills can be highly effective in therapeutic clinical practice with diverse families.
This one-day introductory course is designed to offer a comprehensive foundation in systemic family therapy, including its core theoretical principles, and an introduction to clinical application. Participants will also have the opportunity to begin developing and refining
The course structure integrates skills teaching with interactive discussion, case analysis, and experiential practice. It begins with an introduction to key systemic and relational theories, including concepts such as the family as a system, neutrality, circularity, and relational theories, including concepts such as the family as a system, neutrality, circularity, and relational dynamics. Particular emphasis will be placed on exploring how these theoretical frameworks inform clinical decision-making and how family systems shape both individual functioning and collective patterns of behavior. This course is suitable for clinicians seeking to deepen their understanding of systemic practice and its application across diverse clinical contexts.
This course is the first of a three-part series on Systemic Family Therapy, and a recommended pre-requisite for the following two courses. (See a short description of courses 2 and 3 at the bottom of this description.)
Learning Objectives
- Understand and apply the core principles underlying systemic family practice.
- Identify opportunities to apply various components of systemic assessment for individuals, families and couples.
- Understand and apply systemic practice strategies and therapeutic techniques for family practice.
You will find a registration link in full course description.
Narrative Therapy III: Experiential Skill Building for Advanced Practice
Date: April 17, 2026
Time: 9:00 am to 12:00 pm and 1:00 pm to 4:00 pm PST
CEU: 6 hours
Location: Virtual – Zoom sessions
Cost: $180
Click HERE to learn more and register
Audience:
This advanced-level course is designed for social workers, counsellors, nurses, mental health professionals, students, and others in the human services field who have prior training and experience in Narrative Therapy. Participants should be comfortable with foundational narrative therapy practices, including externalizing, deconstruction, and reauthoring conversations, and be ready to refine their skills.
Description:
This third-level training extends beyond foundational and intermediate narrative practices to focus on advanced narrative inquiry. Emphasis will be placed on how practitioners navigate complex conversational terrains with greater nuance, intentionality, and collaboration. Building on the reauthoring skills developed in Level II, this workshop focuses on scaffolding narrative conversations and the interplay between problem deconstruction and building rich counter stories. The intention of this workshop is to help practitioners engage more deeply with the stories that sustain people’s preferred identities.
Participants will examine the practices that make narrative conversations richly generative, such as double listening, session scaffolding, and attending to power in therapeutic dialogue. Through immersive experiential learning, participants will practice weaving different types of narrative questions in response to the unfolding of real-time therapeutic interactions and supporting people to connect with their values, hopes and preferences. This workshop aims to provide practical skill development and will include a live therapy session and opportunities to practice developing your own narrative questions.
Learning Objectives:
- Develop a deeper capacity to navigate complex narrative conversations by integrating advanced practices such as double listening, attending to power, and balancing deconstruction with the development of rich counter-stories.
- Understand and apply skills in scaffolding narrative inquiries in real time, including weaving together different forms of narrative questions to enhance preferred identities and support connection to values, hopes, and commitments.
- Understand and apply advanced narrative techniques, including formulating, refining, and delivering narrative questions with nuance and intentionality.
You will find a registration link in full course description.
Decolonizing Therapeutic Practice on Stolen Land - Tensions and Tending
Date: TBC (summer 2026)
Time: 9:00 am to 12:00 pm and 1:00 pm to 4:00 pm PST
CEU: 6 hours
Location: TBC (in-person)
Cost: $250
Audience: This workshop is for everyone who is in the healing and helping professions and living on stolen land.
Course description:
We use words like ‘decolonize’, ‘liberation’ or ‘reconciliation’ as terms of this time but what do they mean? How would we know we were pointed in the direction of these possibilities? How might these concepts and possibilities show up in our practice?
This day will be about starting to address these questions; slowing down to be curious with the narratives we carry about ourselves and other, and the impacts of these unconscious stories. This course is an invitation to develop practices that can support us to notice the somatic information that roots us back to ourselves - to our wisdom and to a fuller capacity to reduce the harms that are baked into colonial systems. This is not about shaming or blaming, it is about noticing how shame and blame show up in our bodies and thwart our wisdom. How caring for ourselves could move us towards liberation. We will explore practices to support the knitting together to ‘re-member’ the fullness of who we are to contribute to healing for all.
In this course, you will have the opportunity to consider how you connect with concepts like historical trauma and decolonization in an embodied and somatic way, through authentic connection, allyship, energy, and reframing practice tasks like documentation and duty to report through a decolonizing lens.
More details coming soon.
Journey to Wholeness - An Indigenous and Virginia Satir Approach
Date: June 11-12, 2026
Time: 9:00 am to 12:00 pm and 1:00 pm to 4:00 pm PST
CEU: 12 hours
Location: UBC Point Grey Campus (in-person)
Cost: $450 (lunch included)
NOTE: Familiarity with Virginia Satir’s model is beneficial, however not required.
Target Audience:
Therapists, counsellors, educators, community health workers, social workers, and those who are interested in culturally informed, holistic approaches to healing and personal development. Students in social work and other therapy-oriented programs are also welcome.
Description:
This course explores the intersection of Indigenous knowledge systems and the Virginia Satir Model for personal growth and family therapy. Participants will delve into how Indigenous practices—rooted in relationality, balance, and connection to the land—align with and enhance the core principles of the Satir Model.
Three experienced clinician educators will share diverse methods of how they use the Satir model in their clinical counselling practice, their work with Indigenous peoples and agencies, and in their personal lives. The course emphasizes experiential learning, highlighting tools like storytelling, ceremony, and intergenerational wisdom as complements to Satir’s concepts of congruence, self-esteem, and transformational change.
Through case studies, hands-on exercises, and dialogue, participants will gain a deeper understanding of how to respectfully integrate these approaches to foster healing, harmony, and resilience in Indigenous individuals, families, and communities.
More details coming soon.
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