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Pine River Institute (PRI) helps adolescents struggling with addictive behaviours and other mental health issues, to reclaim their lives, their families, and their futures.
Located in Mulmur, Dufferin County, Ontario, PRI is the only program of its kind in Canada. PRI is primarily a live-in treatment centre and outdoor leadership experience for youth, ages 13 to 19. In addition, our Centre for Family Initiatives (CFI@PRI) extends PRI’s knowledge, experience and evidence-informed treatment model to the broader community, offering strategic learning opportunities for youth, parents and caregivers, educators, clinicians and agency staff to help more youth regain mental wellness and develop the tools they need to combat addictive behaviours.
How do you connect with and support the local community?
First, some context: As Pine River turns the corner into our 20th year of serving youth struggling with addictive behaviours and other mental health challenges, youth in Dufferin County, across Ontario and beyond, are facing a growing crisis in teen substance use and mental health.
The COVID pandemic exacerbated the issues our young people are grappling with and recent studies point to an increasing need to support youth, and their families.
According to the most recent Ontario Student Drug Use and Health Survey (OSDUHS) survey, released last fall, Ontario teens are experiencing a troubling decline in overall mental health.
Among youth:
- Non-medical use of prescription opioids has doubled since 2019.
- For the first time in the survey’s history, the percentage of female students using cannabis, alcohol, and vaping has surpassed that of their male peers.
- More than half of students indicate a moderate-to-serious level of psychological distress, a figure that has doubled over the past decade.
- One in five students report harming themselves on purpose
- One in six students had serious thoughts about suicide in the past year.
- Recent data also shows a significant 136% increase in hospital emergency room visits for mental health and addiction by youth in Ontario.
- A significant uptick in cannabis-induced psychosis poses a growing concern. A study published in Psychological Medicine estimates that teens using cannabis are 11 times more likely to develop psychotic disorders compared to non-users.
- 36% per cent of the overall opioid overdoses in Canada are in Ontario.
For our frontline team, on our campus in Mulmur and through our community work in Dufferin County and across the province, these stats are all too real and we have been actively expanding our reach in an effort to inform, equip, and prevent.
- We collaborate locally with organizations to best plan for suitable referrals and treatment planning for potential students, including:
- SHIP-Supportive Housing In the Province
- Dufferin OPP
- Victim Services
- Choices Youth Shelter
- DCAFS
- CMHA
- Public Health
- PRI has collaborated with the Dufferin Drug Strategy Committee – A working committee that has members from across Dufferin-Caledon with a focus on Drug and overdose awareness
- PRI has engaged with Dufferin OPP & Mobile Crisis Response Team-Supporting referrals for youth, planning future training for working with families and building unique relationships with the OPP to support the safety and relationship with youth within our program.
PRI’s Centre for Family Initiatives (CFI@PRI which you’ll learn more about in other responses) provides free webinars for parents and educators through partnerships with various school boards including UDGSB, SDCSB, Bluewater District School Board. We continue to expand our reach this way, taking our expertise and evidence-based research into the community to better equip parents and educators with knowledge to address the issues facing youth and prevent the need for more intensive interventions
Among Families and Caregivers:
Our students come from across Ontario and so do their families. Families come to appreciate the rolling hills of Dufferin County when they come to spend time or visits with our youth or attend our semi-annual Caregiver workshops. These activities not only heighten their appreciation for the wonders of this part of Ontario but they also generate economic activity for lodging and meals throughout the year.
Pine River is also a substantial employer:
- We employ 114 people, and 75% of those are from the Dufferin County area. We commit to providing training and learning opportunities to our staff team. This learning equips our staff with a deeper insight into youth mental health and treatment empowering them as ambassadors and advocates within their own networks.
- With wonderful support from the Lang Family Foundation, Pine River has created a staff bursary program: the Lang Education Accessibility Program (LEAP) fund. The LEAP bursary pays up to $30,000 for a year and supports studies at the graduate level in disciplines necessary for recognition as a psychotherapist (social work, psychology, child and youth care etc.).
We maintain a strong employment presence in local community job fairs in Shelburne and Orangeville, raising awareness of our important work and also speak to the emerging workforce population about careers in the helping profession.
Describe an example of proactive or innovative leadership your organization has demonstrated.
We are constantly innovating, trying to find opportunities to have a broader impact on the well-being of youth and their families by addressing gaps in services.
- We established our Centre for Family Initiatives (CFI@PRI). Drawing on PRI’s successful model and clinical and research expertise, CFI@PRI offers strategic learning opportunities for youth, parents/caregivers, educators, clinicians and agency staff to help more youth regain mental wellness and develop the tools they need to address addictive behaviours.
- We have expanded our work through schoolboards and now partner with 11 to offer ongoing free webinar series and tailor that content to the needs of schools in partnership with schoolboard mental health leads.
- Through our free masterclasses, CFI@PRI provides families and educators helpful tools, tips, and strategies to reduce the stigma of mental health and to promote mental wellness, on topics including Managing Screen Time, Blended Families, and Understanding Youth Addiction, Anti-sex trafficking, Raising Healthy Kids and Teens, The Power of Showing up, Parenting Resilient Children.
- Pine River also provides training to clinicians and professionals working with youth to extend our model, knowledge, and outcome research to inform family work among others. Trainings have included three-day workshops on our campus for other community mental health works from organizations like Orangeville’s SHIP program, Durham’s New Path Youth and Family Services Ontario and most recently with senior psychiatry residents and faculty from the University of Toronto’s Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Program. We have also taken our training programs out to others, including a range of hospitals and agencies; for example the Sunnybrook Health Sciences adolescent in-patient clinical team and later this month our clinical training travels to Thunder Bay for a third training working with the Family Healing and Wellness Team at Dilico.
- And new last year, we started our BRANCH program, a 16-week outpatient program providing therapeutic support to youth who have sought hospital help for substance use and/or mental health issues and their families. We started with partnership with two hospitals and now work with seven (and that number is growing). As mentioned above, there has been a 136% increase in hospital emergency room visits for mental health and addiction by youth in Ontario and our growing program is working to address the gap in much-needed services.
You can read more about this here. Or you can watch and here from others about the value of this work here: https://youtu.be/xL78Pl0ccuU?feature=shared
Pine River demonstrates proactive leadership in many ways:
- We share our outcome research broadly: Ongoing evaluation is built in to Pine River’s mission and values – we’ve been tracking the impact of our treatment model since inception nearly two decades ago. Client-centred outcome information is collected before, during, and for years after the program. This helps us validate our model, understand our strengths and engage in treatment quality improvement. And we share our evaluation outcomes broadly to inform youth addiction and mental health policy and practices, locally, provincially and beyond.
For example, Pine River weighed in on the federal government’s review of the Cannabis Act, sharing our submission publicly to address our concerns about meeting the promises made and the needs of youth health and wellness around cannabis legislation.
- We model best practices: As part of our accountability to the youth and families we serve, our funders, and various stakeholders, we welcomed the rigorous third-party review by Accreditation Canada. We are proud that among other things, the surveyors highlighted the following in their report:
“PRI is viewed as a trusted organization and leader, and a strong advocate for creating a more responsive youth addiction treatment system locally, and provincially.”
“The program is fundamentally about saving lives, significantly changing the trajectory of young people.”
“PRI is an active and respected community partner and system leaders. Partners recognize PRI as an evidence-driven program.”
“(PRI) is commended for broadly and publicly reporting on its research and quality outcomes.”
“Pine River Institute is commended for its ongoing contributions to the body of knowledge on youth addictions and mental health.”
In what ways have you contributed to the well-being of Dufferin County residents?
- Pine River continues to expand our valuable community programming as mentioned above.
- As a not-for-profit organization serving youth and families from throughout the province, with fixed government funding for just our core program, we have been creative in exploring and encouraging local partnerships and fundraising initiatives to support the additional recreational programming provided to our youth: from equine therapy in partnership at TUFF, to canoe training in the quarry, rowing with Island Lake, to art initiatives, a ski program at Mansfield and overall community engagement. We are grateful to Honeywood Arena for the access it gives our students and were proud to submit our contribution and garner votes towards their success as a finalist in Kraft Hockeyville 2025 Canada.
- Our development team has partnered with Dufferin Community Foundation and its donors supporting Pine River and the community – we supported Island Lake Rowing Club in a grant application to gain financial support from Rowing Canada.
- Our students participate in mutually beneficial volunteer opportunities in our local community including: the Orangeville Food Bank, Kyon Kennels, Tim Hortons drive, and seasonal choir presentations at Dufferin Oaks.
- We strive to be good stewards of the 196 acres of protected land that we are located on in Mulmur, with initiatives that develop gardens and trails, support pollinators like bees and butterflies while giving our students an appreciation of outdoor activities.
- And we share the work that we do through local media, for example this recent article in In The Hills magazine and last month on Rogers Orangeville’s Dufferin Life.
Share how your nonprofit builds strong partnerships or collaborations to increase its impact.
As above:
- Our ongoing and increasing partnerships with school boards
- Our increasing work with hospitals
- Our partnerships with other agencies working with youth to share our knowledge through our clinical trainings
- Our research collaborations with numerous universities to contribute to peer-reviewed scholarly articles in Canada and internationally.
We also value the collaborations which better inform us to be able to meet the needs of diverse and marginalized youth. In particular, we’d like to highlight our ongoing partnership with Gwekwaadziwin Miikan’s Mental Health and Addictions Program (a First Nations program) for young adults established in 2018 on Manitoulin Island.
At that time, we were able to support Gwek staff who spent time on our campus in Mulmur and received training on our program and support with theirs. Today, the partnership has come full circle, with Gwek now providing training for Pine River staff on cultural safety for Aboriginal clients. The training emphasizes understanding colonization’s impact, intergenerational trauma, and mental health and addictions care through an Indigenous lens to better inform our work with youth. You can read more and watch the incredible canoe gift ceremony on our campus this year.
How do you demonstrate pride in being both Canadian and a part of Dufferin County?
We hope we’ve demonstrated lots of that pride as we shared our answers to your previous questions. But there’s one other event this year we’d like to highlight that had us flying the Dufferin flag and Canada Proud!:
Pine River Institute won this year’s Land Rover Defender contest in the Outdoor Accessibility & Education award. It’s a North American-wide contest that saw more than 500 applicants submitting videos from across the continent. We were shortlisted in our category, and then the contest went to public voting. Our engagement with and the support we received from our community in Dufferin County was incredible!
Beyond the much-needed new vehicle and cash prize, it was such a valuable opportunity for Pine River to raise awareness about the work we do (there were numerous articles in local papers like the Orangeville Banner/Orangeville Citizen, Shelburne Free Press, Country105, and in press coverage further afield. The support we received from the community votes was unbelievable and had a Dufferin County non-profit rising to the win among the all-American counterparts in our category! Our teams were invited to the ceremonies in California and later North Carolina where we were able to amplify the increasing needs for more addiction and mental health support for youth and the work we do with our incredible partners in Dufferin County, Ontario, CANADA.
You can read more and see our campus and community on the big screen during the awards ceremonies here.