Tom Regehr

The steady stream of opportunity to honour the work of helping professionals is one of the greatest gifts Tom Regehr receives through his work with CAST Canada. Through formal education workshops or regular conversation, he speaks to those on the front-lines of human suffering, and he acknowledges just how important their work is. He’s been on the front-lines, drawn there through his darkest moments by seeking a path to a better life after years of severe alcoholism and drug addiction led him to live with no shelter, no heat, no food and no meaningful relationships or companionship. Unaddressed childhood trauma and his inability to resolve the grief and pain that grew as a result led him through his continual descent, and it was the support of some key people and organizations that drew him back. Tom refers to one therapist he worked with as “the architect of my reconstruction,” and it was in those sessions that he realized just how important the role of the helping professional is. Still in these early stages of recovery, Tom was asked to sit on an addiction-focused committee with one of Ontario’s Ministry of Health District Health Councils. It was pure tokenism, Tom says, yet in the process he learned the ways in which executive directors and policy-makers with critical organizations approached the lives of the vulnerable. He learned their needs, their challenges and their language. In 1999 Tom began to run the first C.A.S.T. support groups – Come And Sit Together – and for five years, with his feet firmly planted on the ground, he watched people come into the sessions and make positive change in their life. They felt safe, they wanted to be there and they made progress that for most of them could not have been achieved through a 12-step program. CAST evolved and a series of more than 100 panel discussions between front-line professionals and people in active recovery sprung into being, and each of these discussions formed the basis of knowledge that continues to inform CAST Canada’s approach to education. Tom is also the Executive Director of the young non-profit entity, The CAST Projects.