Residential Life Skills is a four-month Salvation Army program designed to help you create, achieve and maintain independent life goals. 

Participants in the program are equipped with a useful set of problem-solving strategies. They return to the community with new coping skills.

The combination of knowing yourself and knowing the world in which you live is the key to finding certainty, structure and healthy comfort in your life.  

The program offering has six areas of focus:

• employment/schooling
• community
• spirituality or personal growth
• self
• independent living
• leisure.

The Residential Life Skills Brochure explains that the program consists of classroom learning as well as hands-on social skills development. The classroom environment is motivational and positive.

Client-focused learning

Classes are centred on you, the learner. We aim for you to develop greater self-confidence, self-awareness and personal empowerment.

You will have the opportunity to participate in over 40 life skills classes. You will focus on a range of topics such as: accountability, values, stress management, active listening and much more. Classes also include practical skills in:

• preparing for a job
• housing search
• food shopping and preparation (See Cooking courses)
• money management

You will also meet and be trained by certain of our community partners. The partners' focus is on the participants learning practical skills, for which there will be 16 classes.

You will receive individual life skills coaching sessions. They are geared to your employment, education, and/or housing needs. The life skills coach will help you discover, set, and maintain focus on your goals. The program lasts four months.

Abstinence-based program

This gives clients enough time to adjust to classes and coaching while also actively pursuing goals you will have set. The program is abstinence-based. Clients who have had substance-use addictions, and who are now in stable recovery, are welcome to apply.

Our role is to help you attain spiritual and social balance. Our dedication to these principles, combined with The Salvation Army’s mission of hope, lead to your successes. They in turn become our success.

The program shares the fourth floor of the OBC building with the residential Stabilization program. There is a TV lounge there, as well as a:

– kitchen
– washer and dryer
– washroom and shower facilities.

The floor also includes staff offices and a classroom. We are located in the Salvation Army’s Ottawa Booth Centre, at 171 George St., in the Byward Market.

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For more information about our Life Skills Program, refer to the contact information below:

Contact:

Stewart Clayten – Residential Life Skills Program Facilitator

(613) 241-1573 ex. 321

Stewart_Clayten@ottawaboothcentre.org