From Policy to Access
Building the Pathway Between Employment and Mental Health Care
When new provincial funding created an opportunity to address mental health barriers to employment, there was a critical gap: no pathway existed to connect job seekers with care. Stride and its employment system partners built that pathway.
When the Ministry of Labour, Immigration, Training and Skills Development announced that employment program funding could be used to cover mental health therapy, it appeared to be a breakthrough. The policy acknowledged what employment service providers have long understood: for many people seeking work, mental health and addiction challenges are one of the biggest barriers to employment.
However, a critical gap quickly became apparent.
The funding existed, yet employment service providers had no clear pathway to connect job seekers with therapists.
Policy change alone does not remove barriers. Systems need pathways that allow people to access the services policy intends to fund.
In Halton Region, the Mental Health + Addictions Alliance is working to strengthen connections between health, social services, and community supports. These efforts recognize that complex challenges such as mental health, addictions, and unemployment rarely exist within a single system.
Recognizing this gap locally, Stride stepped forward to help establish a pathway allowing employment service providers in Halton to connect job seekers with mental health care. Working collaboratively with employment system partners across neighbouring regions, including PATH Employment Services in Hamilton and SSOAR Community Services in Brantford, and with support from Fedcap Canada as Halton's Service System Manager, Stride joined The Insight Collective, a shared referral pathway to create timely access to therapy services for the Halton employment network.
When Systems Don't Connect
Employment services and mental health and addiction services are funded by different provincial ministries and operate in separate systems. Employment counsellors focus on career planning and job search strategies. Mental health professionals address the emotional and psychological challenges that can prevent individuals from engaging fully in work.
Yet for many job seekers, these needs are inseparable.
Julie Henshaw, Executive Director of Stride, puts it plainly: "We have to embed mental health and addiction support into employment services because we're working with human beings who are presenting with their whole story, not just their employment status.”
Canadians with mental health-related disabilities experience nearly double the unemployment rate of the general population.¹ Without access to timely mental health support, individuals facing anxiety, trauma, or depression may struggle to sustain engagement in employment programs or maintain stable work.
The Ministry's policy created funding to address these barriers. What it did not create was a practical mechanism allowing employment service providers to connect clients with therapists.
Building The Insight Collective
To bridge this gap, Stride and its employment system partners co-created The Insight Collective.
The initiative created a shared referral pathway connecting employment services with a network of diverse mental health professionals offering support across languages, professional designations, and geographic locations.
Through this coordination infrastructure, employment counsellors can refer clients who would benefit from therapy and ensure those clients are matched with appropriate providers.
Rather than requiring each agency to independently build relationships with therapists, The Insight Collective created shared infrastructure allowing any employment provider across the Employment Ontario network to access mental health and addiction supports for their clients.
In this way, the pathway itself becomes the service, enabling employment providers to make full use of the Ministry's funding while ensuring clients receive timely and specialized mental health care.
The Pathway in Action
Since launching in March 2025, The Insight Collective has facilitated more than 1,047 referrals and delivered over 2,200 therapeutic sessions. Thirty-seven service providers across the Employment Ontario network are now using the pathway to connect clients with mental health supports.
While employment outcome data is still being studied, early indicators suggest that clients who access psychotherapy are more likely to remain engaged in employment programs.
For many participants, the impact has been immediate.
"This service is not just important, but the most important step," shared one client. "Taking care of mental health first so I can move forward and find a job."
Another participant described how the experience shifted their perspective.
"I came from a culture where seeking mental health support is embarrassing. Now I see mental health as the top priority. I used to worry constantly. My wife says I'm much less tense now."
Others spoke about overcoming skepticism about therapy itself.
"I was unemployed and felt like a 'hot mess,' and I was anti-therapy. But talking about my emotions and being able to share my struggles helped me meet my goals."
The Intersection of Wellness and Work
"For many people, unemployment is tangled with shame, identity loss, and grief," explains Henshaw.
"Work is deeply tied to meaning, belonging, and self-worth. When someone is out of work, they're not just missing income, they're missing structure, purpose, social connection, and a coherent sense of who they are in the world."
Henshaw notes that economic and structural pressures, including poverty, housing instability, caregiving responsibilities, discrimination, and chronic health conditions, can consume the cognitive and emotional bandwidth needed to pursue employment.
"Without attending to mental health and addiction-related needs," she explains, "we ask people to perform confidence while carrying despair, to demonstrate stability while living in crisis, and to plan for the future while struggling to get through the present."
Research consistently demonstrates that employment, income stability, and working conditions are among the most powerful social determinants of health.²–⁴
A Model for System Change
The Insight Collective demonstrates how collaboration across sectors can address gaps that no single organization could solve alone.
By helping establish a shared pathway between employment services and mental health and addiction providers, Stride and its partners transformed a policy opportunity into practical access for clients.
The model is inherently replicable because the service is the coordination infrastructure connecting systems. Similar approaches could be implemented in other regions across the province.
As a member of the Mental Health + Addictions Alliance, Stride's work on The Insight Collective reflects a broader commitment among Alliance organizations to strengthen connections across systems and remove barriers to care.
Health and social services frequently aspire to treat individuals holistically, yet the structure of our systems rarely allows care to be delivered in truly integrated ways. Mental health therapy embedded within employment services allows providers to address multiple dimensions of a person's life at the same time rather than piecing together supports sequentially.
When mental health, addiction, and employment supports are aligned, individuals can stabilize, rebuild confidence, and pursue meaningful work with the support they need.
This type of integration offers a glimpse of what becomes possible when systems organize themselves around the needs of individuals, an approach that initiatives such as Ontario Health Teams are seeking to advance across the province.
As one participant reflected:
"I feel more prepared to cope with stress, more self-aware, and I communicate better in my relationships."
When systems are designed to support the whole person, the outcomes extend far beyond employment. They become the building blocks of healthier, more stable lives.
That is the work of the Mental Health + Addictions Alliance: not simply connecting people to care, but ensuring the systems themselves connect to each other around the needs of the people they serve.
References
1. Statistics Canada. (2019). Labour market participation of persons with mental health-related disabilities.
2. World Health Organization. (2014). Social determinants of mental health.
3. Canadian Public Health Association. (2019). Health equity and the social determinants of health.
4. Modini, M., et al. (2016). Employment as a health intervention: mechanisms linking employment with mental health outcomes. Epidemiology and Psychiatric Sciences, Cambridge University Press.