Special COVID-19 Interview: Ida Hearder, Shuswap Family Centre

Photo by Omar Lopez on Unsplash

We spoke with Ida Hearder, Pregnancy Outreach Program Coordinator at the Shuswap Family Centre in Salmon Arm about their service outreach to families since the Covid-19 situation has significantly impacted everyone’s normal lives.

Ida is grateful to be part of a strong team of co-workers. The team has been offering mutual support through Zoom and phone calls throughout the current crisis. They have been making time for each other and sharing support ideas for issues that have arisen for participants. Staff members have been maintaining a minimum of once a month regular meetings with Exec Director, but she is also very accessible as issues arise which need support in working through, and self-care reminders are part of the culture of the agency.

The Shuswap Family Centre serves a very spread out community. As well as their main office, they have two outreach offices, one about a 25 minute drive, and one about 40 minutes away. The main office is in the town of Salmon Arm, but the agency programs are responsible for a large regional area. If you live in town, families can normally walk to the centre, but for anyone living more than 5 minutes away, the geography becomes too hilly for families to walk to the centre.

Normally, families in the Pregnancy Outreach programs would receive a Good Food Box once a month, along with a monthly $10 dairy products voucher which is accepted by local grocery stores. Because the Good Food Box program has not been able to operate during the Covid lockdown, families were given a $50 gift card to replace the value of two month’s worth of Good Food Boxes (GFB value is $$25 per month). The two-month voucher enabled participants and staff to minimize contact points during the COVID-19 lockdown.

The staff has also given out supplies such as diapers, breast pads, and formula to families, those items which could be sanitized. These were dropped off at homes for families in the program. Necessary paperwork was contained in a zip-lock bag which could be wiped down.

At the time the Covid-19 crisis hit, the Family Centre was in the process of initiating a program called Moms for Recovery. This program is open to all women who are mothers, whether they have custody of their kids or not, or have older kids, honouring their experience of being a woman who has given birth to a child. This is a peer-led group with one professional POP support person. Family Tree Family Resource Program in Kamloops developed the model, which has been very successful there.

Salmon Arm was just launching this group, with child-minding, when COVID hit, so they have launched a soft start-up to the group online and will stay that way while, but there are challenges with using an online format. Safety/anonymity issues mean it is challenging to get buy-in for the online group. It has made it very hard to get participants to join in.

The timing of the pandemic created real problems starting up this program, so it will be re-launched once they can get back to an in-person format. They have just switched to an evening, rather than a daytime format, to see if that would be more accessible for moms. For the moment, they are maintaining the group Zoom whether participants turn up or not. If there are no participants attending in a meeting, the peer facilitator is practicing using the format, with the support person role-playing and providing feedback. The peer facilitator wants to pursue training as an addictions counsellor, so this opportunity is a way for her to move forward towards that goal.

Family legacy and racism, especially toward the Indigenous community, are significant issues in a rural community which has had a stable core community over decades. The centre is working hard to address these real issues, air them and address them. The Covid-19 pandemic has created additional issues around isolation and domestic abuse, and the team is staying accessible to participants to offer support.

The staff has made many, many Zoom calls each week with participants, other staff and support agencies. Weekly Zoom meetings as a staff group have helped to maintain connection and check-ins amongst staff. Where Zoom has not been possible for participants, contact with participant families has been maintained by phone. It has been found that the majority of participants tired of electronic contact very quickly, other than texting, which has been an extremely useful way of maintaining contact, but demand for in-person contact is high.

Fortunately, the building in which the program is housed lends itself well to social distancing and maintaining protocols, so they are now starting up their one-on-one and small groups again to see how that goes. The Healthy Babies drop-in will be harder, because there are crawling babies to manage, so that one is still on hold.

They have also been able to successfully re-launch their walking program. On the first week back, participants were thrilled to be able to get together again outside, with social distancing maintained. The children were contained in strollers, which made it much easier to manage.

It took a while to figure out how to re-introduce the Healthy Babies group, with crawling babies to manage. Now that the weather has improved, they are meeting in the park where they can spread out on blankets and offer sanitizer to anyone at any time during the group time. Ida says that, so far, the little ones are doing well at staying near their parents!