Julia Fonseca
Executive DirectorJulia came to this work as a peer supporter herself. With ten years in community mental health and a background in nonprofit leadership, she now runs the organization she once leaned on.
Founded in a Waiting Room
In the spring of 2014, four people found themselves in the same waiting room at Guelph General Hospital — each there because of a mental health crisis, either their own or someone they loved. They didn't know each other. They were just four strangers sitting with something too heavy to carry alone.
They started talking. They exchanged numbers. They kept meeting after their time at the hospital ended — at a coffee shop, then a library meeting room, then the basement of a church on Woolwich Street. And slowly, they realized that the thing that was helping them most wasn't the clinical care they'd received (though that mattered too). It was each other.
Those four people — Dominique, Kenji, Miriam, and Luc — incorporated Steady Ground Peer Support Services that October. Within a year, their Thursday evening group had grown from four to eighteen. Within three years, they had their first grant, their first dedicated space, and their first paid staff member.
Today we're a team of five staff and 35 trained peer supporters. But the thing we're still doing is the same thing those four people were doing in 2014: sitting with each other, and making sure nobody has to carry things alone.
