Spiritual and cultural support workers bring a distinct and necessary presence to care. At Coova, our spiritual and cultural support services are delivered by practitioners who hold lived experience, cultural knowledge, and community connection, including Indigenous cultural navigators, Elders, and spiritual care providers from a range of traditions. These practitioners work alongside and integrated into the care team leading your plan, bringing dimensions of healing that clinical training alone cannot provide. Your case manager remains your primary point of contact, holding the bigger picture and ensuring all spiritual and cultural support, whether cultural navigation, ceremony, community connection, or spiritual care, is integrated into one coordinated plan built around you.
Whole-Person Support, Rooted in Who You Are
Our spiritual and cultural support services recognize that healing is not only clinical. Identity, community, spirituality, and cultural belonging are foundational to wellbeing, and when those connections are disrupted, strained, or unsupported, health suffers in ways that medication and therapy alone cannot address.
This recognition is intentional. People are not reducible to diagnoses, and care that ignores who someone is, their heritage, their beliefs, their community, their relationship to land and spirit, is incomplete care. Every spiritual and cultural support service at Coova is delivered with deep respect for the individual’s own framework of meaning, without imposition or assumption, and integrated into the broader care plan your case manager is leading.
The goal is not to define what spirituality or culture means for you, but to create space for it within your care, supporting connection, identity, and healing in ways that honour your whole self.
Our Indigenous cultural navigators support clients in connecting with culturally grounded care, community resources, and Indigenous-specific services across BC. Navigation includes helping individuals and families access traditional healing, land-based support, community programs, and Indigenous health services, and ensuring that Indigenous cultural identity is respected and centred throughout the care process.
Where appropriate and requested, Coova supports the involvement of Elders and Traditional Knowledge Holders in a client’s care. This may include ceremony, smudging, storytelling, land-based healing, or guidance grounded in Indigenous ways of knowing, offered with proper protocol, relationship, and cultural integrity.
For individuals navigating serious illness, loss, trauma, or major life transition, spiritual care provides a space to explore questions of meaning, purpose, and identity. Our spiritual care providers work across a range of traditions and frameworks, including but not limited to Indigenous spirituality, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, and secular humanism, meeting each person within their own understanding of the sacred, without judgment or prescription.
Disruption to cultural identity, whether through migration, intergenerational trauma, disconnection from community, or experiences of racism and discrimination within health systems, has direct consequences for mental and physical health. We provide dedicated support for individuals working to reconnect with, reclaim, or navigate their cultural identity as part of their healing.
Beyond direct service, our spiritual and cultural support practitioners contribute to how your entire care team shows up, informing how services are delivered, how communication happens, and how care plans are built to reflect your values, worldview, and community context. Cultural safety is not a checkbox. It is built into how we work.
Your spiritual and cultural support practitioner doesn’t work in a silo. At Coova, real-time communication and transparency across your clinical team, including social work, psychiatry and psychology, occupational therapy, nursing, behavioural consulting, dietitian services, speech and language, and recreational therapy, means cultural and spiritual insights are shared, plans stay aligned, and care is delivered through a team that’s consistently working from the same page.
Our spiritual and cultural support services in BC support individuals and families including:
We also provide spiritual and cultural support for:
It means recognizing that who a person is, their heritage, beliefs, community, and relationship to the spiritual, shapes how they experience illness, how they understand healing, and what care actually feels safe. Spiritual and cultural support at Coova is not about religion being imposed on care. It is about ensuring that a person’s own framework of meaning has a place in their plan, and that the people delivering their care understand and respect it.
No referral is required. You can contact us directly to begin. We welcome self-referrals, as well as referrals from physicians, community health workers, Indigenous health teams, cultural organizations, and community members.
Spiritual and cultural support services are not typically covered by MSP, but there may be more funding options available than you’d expect, including Indigenous-specific health funding, cultural safety programs, and extended health benefits where spiritual care is recognized. Navigating coverage can be confusing, and we’re here to help you get clarity on what applies to your situation.
Support is offered in the setting that is most appropriate and meaningful, in your home, on the land, in community spaces, at cultural centres, or virtually. Where ceremony or traditional practice is involved, we follow the guidance of the practitioner and the individual as to what setting is right.
Our spiritual and cultural support services are designed to complement, not replace, existing care. Your practitioner communicates with your case manager and the rest of your Coova clinical team to ensure cultural and spiritual dimensions are woven into, not separated from, your overall care plan.
Yes, without qualification. Coova’s spiritual and cultural support is non-prescriptive. We do not direct individuals toward any particular tradition, belief system, or practice. Our role is to create the conditions for your own framework of meaning to be present in your care, on your terms.
A consultation is the best place to start. We take the time to understand your situation, your background, and what this kind of support might look like for you. If another form of support would serve you better, we will be transparent and help you find the right direction.
Practitioners in this area hold a range of credentials, lived experience, and community recognition, not all of which map onto regulated professional categories, nor should they. What matters is that practitioners are vetted for cultural integrity, community trust, and alignment with Coova’s commitment to safe, respectful, non-prescriptive care. Where practitioners hold formal credentials, such as certified spiritual care providers or Indigenous health navigators, those are recognized and honoured. We are happy to share the background of any practitioner supporting your care.
Coova Health is based in Vancouver, BC while offering private case management services across British Columbia.
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