Event held in Regina to educate youth on addiction, recovery, and mental health

Jay Bernard and Glenn Kulka hug at Saturday's Empower to Recover event in Regina. (Damian Smith / CTV News)

The Empower to recover Foundation (E2R) visited Regina on Saturday to educate youth on addiction, recovery, and mental health.

Executive director Jay Bernard explained how the foundation began.

“The idea of Empower to Recover Foundation came from me being a celebrity chef and doing a TEDx talk,” he said. “I was like, ‘If I just gather up all different people from all walks of life and get them all into one room, and all the organizations, maybe we could leave the world a better place than we found it.’”

Barnard said he’s been in recovery for 18 years, and has travelled to five different provinces including Nova Scotia, Ontario, Saskatchewan, Alberta and British Columbia with E2R.

The E2R foundation just hit its third anniversary on May 27, with Saturday marking their 30th event.

“What’s exciting about today is we’re launching our ‘Youth-Young Adults Battle for Recovery’ series,” he said on Saturday. “My daughter last year, she’s 10 years old, I love her to death. she looked at me and said, ‘Daddy, can you please help the youth?’”

Much of the day was about education, and how to prevent youth from suffering in a world where addiction can be a massive hurdle.

“It’s really just about education, it’s just really about, ‘Hey, you know what? You can come and tell your story; you don’t have to be ashamed of that. Hey, you can come and share. Hey, you can come and talk.’”

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Barnard said they’ve had 278 different speakers and 252 different community partners since the launch of their foundation. He said they’ve directly helped 53 different individuals with a 79 per cent recovery rate.

“Everybody’s on a healing journey; it doesn’t matter who you are,” he said. “Everybody has three common bonds. We all have a level of trauma, we’re all recovering from [something], and we all have a story. So, at the end of the day, that means the world’s full of hope in my eyes.”

Travelling from Ottawa, Glenn Kulka was a keynote speaker for the day. Kulka is a former Saskatchewan Roughriders defensive lineman, but also has history playing the Western Hockey League, and competing in the World Wrestling Federation, now known as the WWE.

In Ottawa, Kulka spends a few days a week helping out the homeless with a group called Steps off the Street.

Now 62, his story goes back to when he was 13, sneaking shots of alcohol from his parents’ cabinet. From there, he struggled with cocaine and steroids throughout his football and martial arts life.

He said he hit rock bottom in 2000, taking cat tranquilizers, cocaine, ecstasy, and drinking alcohol. In April of that year, after being drugged and drunk, he said he had a 16-gauge shotgun in hand while walking his dog.

With the intention of taking his own life, he credits his dog, Rocco, for saving his life.

Since then, it’s been a gradual road to detox and rehab, and he eventually found religion.

As someone who looks to help people that are dealing with addiction, recovery, and mental health issues, he said there’s a much bigger abundance of drugs available compared to when he was growing up.

“There just wasn’t as much in the 70s and 80s, there was cocaine, I remember even like there was no such thing as meth,” he said. “All these new drugs and now you’ve got fentanyl.”

Here in Saskatchewan for a few days, Kulka said alcohol and drug abuse remains similar to what Ottawa is going through.

“They kind of got a similar problem that we have in Ottawa,” he said. “For the size of our city, the addictive use and the street homeless people that are being tortured and tormented by these new drugs, numbers are exasperated. It’s way beyond what the population should have as far as addiction.”