Tom Sidney Named Alumni of Distinction Changing Lives Recipient
Posted on Monday, September 20th, 2021
Every year, Algonquin College celebrates the incredible achievements of its alumni through the Alumni of Distinction Awards. These awards honour the extraordinary contributions our graduates make to the community while achieving career success. Here is a closer look at the Alumni of Distinction – Changing Lives recipient Tom Sidney.
Councillor, Town of Renfrew
Clinic Manager, Robbie Dean Centre
Social Service Worker, Class of 2002
Tom Sidney says he doesn’t like to talk about himself or his success working with individuals and families in Renfrew County.
But as Clinical Manager for the Robbie Dean Family Counselling Centre, Councillor for the Town of Renfrew and former Senior Management for the National office of Operation Go Home, Sidney has made such notable inroads as a counsellor, politician, motivational speaker and volunteer that people want to learn about him and from him about mental health issues that can impact any family at any time.
“I like to be low-key but I’m six-foot-three, 320 pounds, bald with earrings and covered in tattoos,” he says. “It’s hard to blend in when you look like me and you’re so not a suit guy. I wear jeans and T shirts. People think I’m a biker when they first meet me. But people connect with me because I’m real. I’ve been called the Dr. Phil of Renfrew Country because I listen to people and connect with them on their level.”
It took time for Sidney to find his footing in this line of work. When he graduated from high school, he attended night classes at Algonquin College in Advanced Police Sciences. Policing was something he had been interested in for some time and acquiring his certificate in the program was a first step toward that goal. But he was deflected onto another path by one of his mentors, who happened to be a police officer. He said that, based on the young man’s character and interests, he felt Sidney could help more people in other ways than by taking up the day-to-day functions of a police officer.
With the certificate in hand, he started out as a special constable with the Renfrew Police Service, doing court security and other related tasks. Through this, he became involved with a group of people who established the Renfrew Police Victoria Youth Centre, one of just two police-operated youth centres in Ontario, the other being in Ottawa. He became executive director of the centre, learning more every year about the issues facing youth in Renfrew County.
When area policing switched over to the OPP, though, the Centre lost its institutional support and Sidney, by now in his late 20s, decided to return to Algonquin the College. He’d found an area in which he could make a difference through the Centre, and this time he worked his way through the Social Service Worker program at the Pembroke Campus with the Class of 2002.
“Mine had always been a philanthropic kind of family,” he says. “We were always keen to help people out, so social service work was a natural fit for me.”
When it came time to do his placement, he faced a problem. He wasn’t a good fit for Renfrew County opportunities because he had had a professional relationship with many of the people who might take him on. The College allowed him to go to Ottawa instead, where he worked with Operation Go Home (now Operation Come Home), which, at the time, were focused on reuniting runaway youth with their families, offering a 24-hour national crisis line and community outreach.
“I did my placement and got hired right after,” he says, and it was the beginning of a years-long commitment to supporting homeless youth. He rose to become National Director of Crisis Services and sat on Senator Romeo Dallaire’s committee on missing and exploited children. Sidney was also nominated to the RCMP and Air Canada National Child Recovery Award.
He describes the work as deeply satisfying on many levels and emotionally taxing. When his mother suffered a stroke and he was needed in Renfrew, he stepped away from work for a time to help. When he returned to the workforce, he took a position with the local newspaper until an opportunity arose to work at the Catholic School Board as a youth worker. It was there he met 17-year-old Robbie Dean and his mother, an encounter that would lead to the creation of the Robbie Dean Family Counselling Centre.
Dean was a young man experiencing serious mental health issues at the time and sadly he would soon take his own life. Mental health resources for young people in the county were few at the time and difficult to access quickly. In the wake of Dean’s suicide, Sidney and Monique Yashinskie (Robbie’s mom) made the decision to establish a family counselling centre. “Monique and I got together and worked to figure out what Renfrew County needed. What we developed, with the help of the Rotary Club, which provided some seed money, was a crisis walk-in clinic. It operated every Wednesday night from 5 to 9 in Pembroke. I was the only paid counsellor.”
Every Thursday night he volunteered the same service, and this went on for a year and a half until funding improved and a larger team could be hired. Due to COVID-19, there are no longer walk-in services (they will return at a later date), but the Centre now offers free short-term mental health counselling to individuals who are troubled but who don’t have a mental health diagnosis.
“Basically, we work with a lot of people who are having difficult times dealing with life and with families that are having trouble coping. We are a grassroots organization filling in a gap in the system and when we see that the problem would be best dealt with by an existing agency, we refer them.”
Helping means listening attentively, connecting and sometimes challenging people to determine their own path out of their situation. He prefers to tell people he’s their mental wellness coach and that they need to work together on whatever difficulties they’re facing.
“I’m there to empower and motivate, like a coach, and I like to joke that at the end of the day I can also give you a virtual push to say, ‘Come on, you can do this, let’s go!’ Empowering people works – our stats are good and it’s not all because of me. Our team at the Centre is phenomenal. We work well together and we have the same goals to empower people to become who they want to be.”
He acknowledges this puts a positive face on problems that in some circumstances can be dire for, say, the student so angry at life that they can no longer feel anything like joy or the first responder whose exposure to life’s darkest experiences conceivable has left them inconsolable. It was fulfilling being able to do that when Sidney was the Eastern Ontario Coordinator for Emergency Disaster Services and Co-coordinator of the Salvation Army, Red Cross Victim Response Team for the Ottawa Fire Dept. Sidney’s Team was awarded the City of Ottawa’s Volunteer Group of the Year.
“Sometimes you get letters, thanking you, from people who are thriving and doing fantastic now but who two years earlier were on the edge. I don’t say it’s rewarding because I don’t do this for the rewards. But it does reinforce your belief in the road you’re on when you know you’ve worked with people with dark stories and dark experiences and you’ve been able to bring some light into their world.”
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