Current Offerings

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:

1. Identify and assess mental health symptoms and substance use challenges at a foundational level
2. Develop foundational skills and strategies for effective and ethical engagement with individuals experiencing mental health and substance use challenges
3. Describe and examine the social determinants of mental health and substance use, and methods to support holistic recovery
4. Apply trauma-informed, strengths-based, and anti-oppressive approaches to engagement with individuals experiencing mental health and substance use challenges

Decolonizing Therapeutic Practice on Stolen Land - Tensions and Tending [Cancelled]

This course has been cancelled due to changes in the facilitator’s availability due to unforeseen circumstances.

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.

Learning Objectives:

• Critically understand concepts like white supremacy, colonization, reconciliation, and liberation, and how these concepts emerge in practice with Indigenous and non-Indigenous clients.
• Connect reflexively with your own unconscious narratives and embodied experiences of colonization, reconciliation, and liberation.
• Understand and apply a somatic approach to explore embodied experiences of historical trauma in clients, and in yourself as a practitioner.
• Apply this somatic lens to fostering authentic connections, liberation and healing in your practice with Indigenous and non-Indigenous clients.

Learning Activities:

There will be Circle sharing, small group discussions, journaling prompts and time for quiet and movement. Groups will be formed to support white, brown, black and Indigenous bodies to find connections that most support gentle conversations with individuals with a similar embodied and racialized experiences. With prompts and activities there will be an opportunity to slow and connect with somatic information to support liberation practices.