Speaker Name: Giri Puligandla
Session Description:
When someone reaches out for help, it’s rarely their first choice—it’s their last brave step. In those moments, complexity isn’t just inconvenient; it can be overwhelming, discouraging, and even dangerous. Yet across mental health and addiction systems, we often ask people to navigate a maze of phone numbers, programs, and entry points before they ever reach the right support.
This talk explores a simple but powerful idea: what if the system adapted to people, instead of asking people to adapt to the system?
Alberta is taking a bold step by positioning 211 as the front door to the mental health and addiction system—one recognizable, human point of connection that integrates crisis response, system navigation, and prevention. This presentation reflects on why simplifying help‑seeking matters, how it strengthens recovery capital, and what becomes possible when we design systems around real human behaviour rather than organizational boundaries.
Drawing on Alberta’s unique advantages, including province‑wide access, co‑located crisis and navigation expertise, and deep partnerships with clinical services and community‑based supports, this talk highlights how Alberta’s positioning of 211 as a front door for mental health and addiction supports provides clarity and continuity while instilling compassion and hope at exactly the right moment.
Most importantly, it shows how connecting helplines to clinical services and to community supports builds recovery beyond appointments and programs into stability, relationships, purpose, and belonging. Because recovery doesn’t live in a phone call. It lives in communities.
This is not a technical presentation about systems change. It’s a reflection on trust, timing, and what happens when the first question someone hears isn’t “Which number did you mean to call?” but “I’m glad you reached out, here’s how I can help.”
Learning Objectives:
“Participants will understand why simplifying access to mental health and addiction support is critical at moments of vulnerability, and how system complexity can unintentionally undermine help‑seeking, engagement, and recovery outcomes.
Participants will explore how integrating crisis response, system navigation, and prevention through 211 as a front door can strengthen recovery capital by creating clarity, continuity, and more human experiences of care.
Participants will reflect on Alberta’s unique opportunity to align helplines, clinical services, and community‑based supports, and consider how intentional system design can shift recovery from isolated services toward connected, community‑rooted pathways.”
BIO
Giri Puligandla is Executive Director of the Canadian Mental Health Association (CMHA) Edmonton Region. CMHA is Canada’s oldest, most extensive community mental health organization, supporting and advocating for individuals and families across the country. Tens of thousands of people in Edmonton and across Northern Alberta depend on CMHA Edmonton’s services, including peer and family support, housing, suicide bereavement, education and training, and helplines like the Distress Line, 9-8-8, and 2-1-1.
Giri has a reputation as a change-maker from previous roles managing cross-ministry mental health strategy implementation for the Government of Alberta, pioneering homelessness systems of care at Homeward Trust Edmonton, and as Executive Director of Caregivers Alberta and the Schizophrenia Society in Edmonton when he was in his 20s. He believes systems only get better if people with lived experience and their families are leading transformation. He holds a MSc in health promotion from the University of Alberta.