Reimagining Community-Based Mental Health
A Future Systems Blueprint Designed With Community
The Canadian Mental Health Association engaged J5 to help reimagine how community-based mental health could work across Edmonton. The existing system was complex, fragmented, and often reactive, making it difficult for people to find support and for organizations to work collectively toward better mental health outcomes.
Working alongside people with lived experience, service providers, healthcare professionals, community members, and policymakers, we explored what a more supportive future could look like. Together, we developed a Future Systems Blueprint that places people and community at the centre, supported by accessible services, enabling policies, and more coordinated funding.
INDUSTRY
Healthcare
CLIENT
Canadian Mental Health Association
WHY IT MATTERS
Mental health is shaped by much more than access to clinical services. It is influenced by relationships, culture, workplaces, neighbourhoods, and whether people feel connected to supportive communities.
This work reframed community-based mental health as a shared responsibility rather than something individuals must manage alone. The resulting blueprint provides CMHA Edmonton and its partners with a common vision for designing more preventative, inclusive, culturally appropriate, and relationship-centred approaches to mental health and well-being.
PROCESS HIGHLIGHTS
We interviewed more than 30 organizations and engaged people with lived experience and equity-deserving communities to understand the current system, its gaps, and the values that should shape its future.
More than 50 people participated in future-focused co-design workshops, creating speculative prototypes that revealed how community, services, policy, and funding could work together differently.
Impact
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Individual Level
People with lived experience helped define what better mental health support should look and feel like within their communities.
The final model reflected the importance of belonging, relationships, culture, prevention, and supporting the whole person. Participants shared that they felt seen and heard in the blueprint.
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Service Level
Service providers and community organizations gained a shared framework for considering how programs, services, and informal supports could work together around people’s lives.
The blueprint identified opportunities to strengthen community capacity while ensuring formal services are available to complement, not replace, the support found within families, workplaces, cultures, and neighbourhoods.
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System Level
CMHA Edmonton gained a Future Systems Blueprint connecting individual experience, community support, formal services, policy, and funding within one holistic model.
The organization is using the model as a living framework to guide its community mental health strategy, shape future engagement, and co-design the next generation of mental health supports with the people they are intended to serve.