This event will provide families with information about mental health supports available in the community for parents/caregivers. Families attending can ask questions directly to service providers and family members with lived experience of navigating supports and self-care while caring for loved ones with disabilities. The panel will include: 

•    Dr. Shiv Sivapalan - CARES Caregiver Support Program. CARES is an 8-week program providing mental health support for caregivers and siblings of children on the autism spectrum. 

•    Sherron Grant – Co-Founder of Black Parent Support Group – a group for Black caregivers of children or adults with disabilities

•    Dr. Yona Lunsky – Director of Health Care Access Research at CAMH – a leader in developing mental health supports for parent/caregivers of children and adults with disabilities. 

Please join us to learn and discuss!  

See below for further information about our speakers:

Dr. Shiv Sivapalan:
A family doctor by profession, Dr. Sivapalan believes in the potential for change to the current diagnostic landscape for children with Autism. After six years of a busy and fruitful family practice, Dr. Sivapalan left his practice to help facilitate this change. With an interest in child development, Dr. Sivapalan has worked collaboratively with multiple stakeholders to design the Mobile Developmental Outreach Clinic also known as M-DOC, a unique developmental screening initiative whose goal was to increase access to diagnosis and intervention support for newcomer communities. In addition, Dr. Sivapalan helped develop the CARES caregiver support program, which employed a task-shifting model to provide mental health support for caregivers and siblings of children on the autism spectrum.

About the CARES program:
The CARES group program situates parents in a safe space to share their experiences as caregivers of children on the autism spectrum and learn about taking care of their own mental health. In this highly interactive, semi-structured eight-week program, parents learn about topics such as: stress management, helpful thinking, self-compassion, and problem-solving. This broad-ranging curriculum has been put together with the intention of discussing topics and learning skills that participants will find applicable to their experiences as caregivers but are also transferable to other domains in their life. CARES is currently run virtually at SAAAC Autism Centre and in partnership with Autism Ontario offering sessions in English, French, Urdu and Tamil. 

Sherron Grant - Co-Founder of Black Parent Support Group:
Clovis and Sherron Grant are parents of 2 children, ages 26 & 24 years, one of whom has special needs. Sherron is a school principal in the Toronto District School Board and Clovis is the Chief Executive Officer of 360°kids, an organization serving homeless youth in York Region. They founded the Black Parent Support Group in November 2020.  Since then, the group has grown quickly to a membership of 130 and counting and approaching 100 Facebook friends from across the world including across Canada, the United States, the Caribbean and some African nations. Being in a virtual world has truly opened the doors to this unique kind of connection for this unique kind of need. 

Support, isolation, funding, resources, friends….These are the things that many families who care for someone with special needs think and worry about. For many of these families, their circle of support is quite small. This is often the case for racialized communities who have a child with special needs.  The Black Parents of Children and Adults with a Disability Support Group (BPSG) was created to provide a safe space for families of African descent to come together to meet and connect, share resources, expertise and needs, inspire and support one another through our unique and often challenging and isolating journey of raising Black children or supporting a sibling, of any age, with a disability. It is a volunteer run group that meets on the 2nd and 4th Tuesday of each month at 7pm via Zoom.  There will be guest speakers, resource sharing, support and mentorship opportunities for attendees. For more details or to register, please contact us at bpsgroup2020@gmail.com. You can also find us on Facebook @ BPSG: Black Parents of Children and Adults with a Disability Support Group.

Dr. Yona Lunsky: 
Dr. Yona Lunsky is Director of the Azrieli Adult Neurodevelopmental Centre, and the Health Care Access Research and Developmental Disabilities (H-CARDD) Program at CAMH. She is Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Toronto and Adjunct Scientist at ICES.

Dr. Lunsky has focused her research on the mental health needs of individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities, and their families. She studies psychosocial risk factors for psychiatric disorders and health service utilization patterns in this population. Dr. Lunsky is the principal investigator of several studies examining clinical and systems issues related to health services. She is also involved in a number of projects focused on improving primary, emergency and mental health care, and she works in partnership with people with disabilities and families to co-design and jointly deliver these interventions.