About Life Voice
People helping people to prevent suicide + build resilience
Life Voice develops and delivers award-winning training and development programs, workshops and resources for mental health, suicide prevention, resilience and wellbeing — at work, school, sports and home.
Our trainings help people help people living with challenges, including depression, anxiety, PTSD (Post-traumatic Stress Disorder), thoughts of suicide, substance use, psychosis, eating disorders, self-injurous behaviours and more.
All you need is a place to START
Our certified trainers deliver programs that matter
We are certified to deliver Mental Health First Aid, Compassion Fatigue, ASIST (Applied Suicide Intervention Skills Training) and safeTALK programs. As a Workplace Safety and Prevention Services partner, we deliver Mental Health First Aid training across Southwestern Ontario, including the GTA. We are also a Government of Canada service provider, delivering Mental Health First Aid virtual training to federal employees from coast to coast through 2024. We offer both virtual and in-person programming delivery models.
Thank you for making this topic accessible. The ripple effect will be even more impactful than this workshop, which I found very valuable.
START participant, Youth Worker, Alberta
Skills for life
Our group of certified trainers are passionate about delivering life-changing workshops. We work across Canada and have had the honour of training in multi-generational and multicultural contexts. Some of our experiences have brought us to Inuit and First Nations communities where we feel we’ve learned as much from our participants as they have from us! We equip teams and individuals with skills for life, and our reward is seeing these trainings save lives.
Our Vision
Our vision is to create suicide-safer communities one person at a time. We do this through mental health workshops, refined workplace mental health policies and procedures, resilience-building workshops and webinars, and making national crisis support resources easily accessible to the public.
Our Mission
About Shawna Percy, Life Voice Founder and President
Hi, I’m Shawna.
I founded Life Voice in 2017 to develop and deliver training programs that prevent suicide, support mental health, and build resilience and wellbeing.
It’s incredibly rewarding seeing the life-changing difference that good training and intervention can make in the lives of the people around us. My team and I have some of the most privileged jobs in the world sharing insights, tools and strategies that have such an incredible impact.
Shawna is an active member of the Ecological Farmers Association of Ontario (EFAO) and a registered beekeeper with the Ontario Beekeeping Association (OBA). She also volunteers with The Guardian Network, a peer-driven community offering vital support to farmers during periods of high stress, including those experiencing thoughts of suicide.
Our main training programs are focused on suicide prevention, mental health and resilience, including our signature START Psychological Health and Safety Program.
I often describe thoughts of suicide as being a hostage taker. Those thoughts come over a person and threaten to take their life. But each one of us is hard wired with a Life Voice, and that Life Voice will fight to keep us safe.
Through our programs we teach participants how to come alongside a person at risk to help them find their Life Voice again.
By joining a certified training experience like Mental Health First Aid, ASIST (suicide intervention skills training,) safeTALK, or Compassion Fatigue and Vicarious Trauma, participants equip themselves to help those in a mental health crisis.
If you believe in physical first-aid you already know early intervention saves lives and the general public can be equipped to help. Mental Health first-aid is even more relevant and needed today more than ever…in our schools and playgrounds, our places of work and our homes.
If you’d like to request a proposal for your organization, explore our unique resiliency building workshops, or if you’re seeking the development of a specialized training program for your team’s needs, you’ve come to the right place. This is what we do, and we love it!
In 2016 I had the honour of giving a TEDx talk at the University of Waterloo. My talk was called “Suicide is preventable.” It’s a great way to get to know me!
Also, my book “Breathe: a true story about marriage, faith, and attempted suicide” was officially published in 2014.