Welcome to ABRPO

A New Year Message from our Director, Thomas Egdorf

2021 was a challenging and interesting year for ABRPO.  We continued to deliver services virtually due to COVID 19.  During this year we developed a number of online learning opportunities to build worker skills. These have included the Grounding Course, Holistic Check-in Module and redevelopment of the When Grief Comes to Work manual to an online format.  We have also partnered with the OAN and Casey House to provide virtual workshops and learning opportunities for workers and managers on the topics of Building Resiliency and Radical Empathy; and provided bimonthly learning opportunities for Support Workers and Managers.  We continued to offer virtual staff debriefing sessions.

Turning To One Another (TTOA) continues to run popular monthly virtual sessions for Peers and Staff of agencies, including expanding from 14 to 21 agencies.  Over the last half of the year we began the process of converting our nine day, three-part Peer Engagement and Facilitator Training to an online learning format (expected to launch in early 2022).

In 2021 we began a process to develop grief, loss and resiliency tools that are culturally relevant to the ACB communities and expect to begin launching new tools starting in late Winter 2022.

As the ABRPO team looks toward 2022 we plan to continue to develop our online learning opportunities including launching an online learning module on Bracketing; Gathering to Remember, a zine on how to facilitate a memorial; a Grief Basics Course and much more.  Stay tuned and visit our website frequently to see the new learning opportunities we continue to develop.

Who We Are

AIDS Bereavement and Resiliency Program of Ontario (ABRPO) assists:

• Agency staff to continue to provide effective and compassionate service.
• Organizations to retain and care for invaluable staff, peers, and volunteers.
• Communities to respond effectively to the unique needs of their members.

We have been assisting AIDS service organizations (ASOs), other HIV-related community organizations in Ontario to strengthen resiliency in the face of multiple loss and grief since 1994. We have been responding to the traumatic grief of the overdose crisis since 2017. ABRPO’s programs are funded by Ontario’s Ministry of Health, AIDS & Hepatitis C Programs.