Meet your counsellor
Rayanne Banaga
Rayanne Banaga is a highly motivated and experienced mental health professional with a strong background in community building, anti-oppressive practices and a healing-centered approach to community care and mentorship. She has over 5 years of experience working in the field of community based mental health, alongside a lifetime of lived experience. Rayanne is highly skilled in facilitating support groups and psycho-educational workshops, client case management, program management, and organizational capacity building. She has been recognized for her excellence in practice and innovation and is a highly skilled communicator, group facilitator and problem solver.
"I believe in the power of collaborative knowledge sharing, storytelling, mentorship, and psychoeducation to help individuals achieve their wellness goals by better understanding themselves. As someone who has gone through my own recovery journey, I understand the importance of having a supportive guide on the path to mental wellness. My role is to support you through your own journey, drawing on my experiences and extensive knowledge of trauma, specifically from restorative and transformative frameworks that draw on Africentric & North American indigenous teachings, as well as my experience as a mental health worker and youth worker. I can help you navigate mental health resources, and together, we can work towards understanding yourself, your body and the wellness that you value."
My approach to counseling is rooted in the values of peer support. If you are not familiar with peer support, it is a framework of mutual support that was originally born out of the anti-institutional ‘mad movement’ by survivors of psychiatric institutionalization which centred on the understanding that mental health institutions historically were not built by people who understood or included the lived experience of madness, but rather were built to control, regulate and dispose of people whose behaviours are deemed inconvenient and disruptive to the white supremacist ideal society, many of which are rooted in anti-black and anti-inidgenous values of productivity. The values and practices of peer support can be briefly summarized by the phrase "nothing about us without us."