mission
Keeping Indigenous Youth Connected to Family, Culture, and Community
Indigenous Youth Services is an Indigenous-led organization dedicated to addressing the systemic failures that continue to separate Indigenous children from their families, cultures, and communities. We provide family-centered, culturally grounded mental health and care supports designed to prevent unnecessary placement, address generational trauma, and bring meaningful care to families where they live.
Our work is rooted in the understanding that healing does not occur through removal, containment, or compliance. It occurs through connection, stability, cultural identity, and sustained relational support.
Why Indigenous Youth Services Exists
For generations, Indigenous families have been disproportionately impacted by systems that respond to trauma with separation rather than support. Child welfare, mental health, and care systems have too often removed children instead of addressing the conditions placing families at risk.
Indigenous Youth Services exists to challenge that pattern.
We work to keep youth safely connected to their families whenever possible, strengthen caregivers rather than replace them, and ensure that culture, identity, and community are recognized as essential components of healing, not optional additions.
Our Core Areas of Support
We work directly with families navigating complex mental health, behavioral, and child welfare challenges. Our supports focus on stabilizing the home environment, strengthening caregiver capacity, and addressing underlying drivers of distress so families can remain safely together.
Virtual Care and CareLink Services
Through our CareLink platform, youth and families receive consistent, relationship-based support regardless of location or placement changes. This ensures continuity of care, reduces disruption, and allows support to follow the youth rather than the system.
Cultural Mentorship and Reconnection
We support Indigenous youth in reconnecting with culture, identity, and community in ways that are meaningful to them. Cultural mentorship is integrated into care as a foundation for belonging, pride, and long-term wellbeing.
Training and System Support
We provide training and consultation to caregivers, agencies, and professionals seeking alternatives to containment-based care. Our work supports system shifts toward understanding-driven, family-centered, and culturally grounded practice.
Recognition Rooted in Responsibility
Our work has been formally recognized through national and international awards acknowledging leadership, innovation, and impact in youth mental health and family-centered care. These recognitions reflect trust earned through accountability, transparency, and sustained results rather than a pursuit of visibility.
They reinforce our responsibility to continue advocating for systems that heal rather than harm, and to remain accountable to the communities we serve.
Our Commitment Moving Forward
Indigenous Youth Services exists to confront the structural conditions that create harm, not to adapt families to broken systems. Our mission is to address the intergenerational impacts of displacement and trauma by restoring connection to culture, strengthening family systems, and ensuring care reaches families before separation becomes the solution.
We remain committed to dismantling barriers, supporting reunification and cultural reconnection, and advancing care models grounded in dignity, self-determination, and long-term healing.
