This charity is putting $18.5m into FNMI mental health

To many, Movember refers to the act of not shaving during the month of November to help raise funds and awareness for prostate cancer. It’s also a global charity that’s focused on fighting early causes of male mortality: prostate cancer, testicular cancer, and mental health and suicide prevention

Sonia Prevost-Derbecker is the charity’s Global Director of the Indigenous Portfolio, and is based out of Winnipeg, MB. She works with Indigenous groups and related projects in Canada, the USA, Australia and New Zealand. The portfolio’s latest project will invest $18.5 million over seven years into Indigenous communities and organizations across Canada to help support projects related to the emotional and social well-being of Indigenous men.

“We have innovation grants with individuals and organizations that look to innovate programming for Indigenous men’s wellness,” said Prevost-Derbecker. “It’s for groups that want to innovate in some way — maybe it’s a health organization, they may be an addictions-based organization, housing, whatever, they want to start doing wellness programming and think innovating in a certain way will change their outcomes.”

The innovation grant will provide groups up to $300,000 a year, and interested groups have until May 31 to submit an expression of interest. Movember’s other stream, also open until the 31st, focuses on community empowerment involving multiple partners, such as healthcare centres, schools, or women’s shelters. That stream provides up to $700,000 a year for five years.

“For a small community, that’s a large amount of money,” said Prevost-Derbecker. “It’s for communities that are 10,000 people or less — we aren’t going to tip the balance in a community that’s four million people.”

Movember lists mental health and suicide prevention as two of its current priorities and acknowledges the role social isolation and exclusion can have on suicide risk factors.

“Connecting to culture and traditional ways of being has been shown to be protective of mental health and wellbeing, however many Indigenous men don’t have the opportunity for cultural engagement,” reads the Indigenous communities’ section of its website.

Data from Statistics Canada shows Indigenous men are more than two times as likely to commit suicide than their non-Indigenous peers, and according to a 2019 report, that number increased to as much as nine times their non-Indigenous counterparts for certain Inuit populations.

Prevost-Derbecker pointed to Work 2 Give as an example of a successful program funded by Movember but led by an Indigenous community. It offers 18 to 89-year-old inmates the opportunity to make items required by Indigenous communities. She said while the charity wasn’t currently funding a program like that in the Prairies, funding streams like these were a good opportunity for them to get off the ground in different regions of the country.

“Indigenous men’s mental health is largely ignored or not noticed globally, yet in some of our areas in Canada, it’s nine times that of the global average — we have a real epidemic happening,” said Prevost-Derbecker. “We know that communities and families don’t walk towards wellness by leaving their men behind. It takes all of us collaboratively to work towards a joint outcome with this.”