Support Starts Here: How Kids Help Phone Built a Digital Tool for Youth Service Navigation
Mental wellness support is difficult to find, and even when available, youth mental health services are often fragmented, requiring young people to navigate a complex and disconnected system. Seeking the right support requires youth to navigate between complex systems, with nearly 30% of youth not accessing support they need because they are unsure about how to navigate the system. This presentation will take you through Kids Help Phone’s journey on co-designing Resources Around Me, a digital service navigation tool for young people across Canada. We’ll take you behind the scenes of how we designed, built, implemented, and are continuously improving the tool, in collaboration with young people.
Speakers
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Alisa Simon
Executive Vice President, E-Mental Health Transformation & Chief Youth Officer
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Alisa Simon brings more than 30 years of leadership experience in healthcare access and non-profit management to her role as Group Head and Executive Vice President, e-Mental Health Transformation and Clinical Services at Kids Help Phone. In this role, Alisa oversees Kids Help Phone’s national clinical service programs, providing strategy, leadership and guidance to more than 150 clinical staff and thousands of volunteer crisis responders across Canada. Through her focus on building innovative digital systems that break down barriers to care by changing the way care is delivered, measured and received, Alisa is driving the transformation of Canada’s youth mental health landscape and creating equitable access to support for youth across the country. Under Alisa’s leadership, Kids Help Phone has evolved from a phone-based helpline to a comprehensive solution that fully integrates a growing number of access points, programs and resources, achieving over 13 million interactions since 2020. Alisa also oversees knowledge translation, quality assurance and equity programs, ensuring the organization is delivering the best possible services to young people, particularly youth from equity-seeking communities.
Alisa holds a Master of Public Health degree from the University of North Carolina. She has won two Digital Health Canada awards, including Digital Health Executive of the Year in 2022 and Women Leader in Digital Health in 2024.
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Lydia Sequeira, PhD
Kids Help Phone
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Dr. Lydia Sequeira is the Executive Director, Applied Research at Kids Help Phone. She’s an experienced researcher and academic who’s passionate about sharing her digital health expertise to advance access to mental health supports for young people across Canada. Lydia holds a PhD in Health Informatics from the University of Toronto and has contributed to academic literature on topics such as digital phenotyping, implementation science, predictive analytics for suicide risk and social determinants of health. In 2024, Lydia was honoured to be recognized for her work with a Women Leaders in Digital Health Award from Digital Health Canada.
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