GraceWins Peer Support [GraceWins] was started by Percy D’Souza in March 2021. At the core of GraceWins is his vision of a purpose-driven, values-centred mental health peer support service that is resolutely client focused, agile, entrepreneurial, compassionate and accountable. It is born from his own experience of suffering through and recovering from severe mental illness. As such he has experienced first hand both the considerable benefits and considerable challenges of our mental health system. 

On recovering from his mental illness in the spring of 2018 Percy applied himself to working pro bono in the hospitals where he had been a patient, as well as in other community-based mental health support services in his community of Durham. He did this as he was figuring out how he could use his unique blend of experiences [marketing, sales, communications, project management and most importantly, lived experience of severe mental illness], skills and passion to enable others that struggle with mental illness to move forward on their recovery journeys. GraceWins is a result of this journey of personal discovery and realization, first internal and subsequently external. 

We are a ‘DreamTeam’ of like-hearted, diversely–minded, diversely experienced individuals with a common passion for the GraceWins purpose. Most of us have had our own life-transforming experience with mental illness, addictions, homelessness and such.

GraceWins was incorporated as a not-for-profit corporation in June 2021. We have an experienced, committed Board of Directors that oversees our governance. We started providing our mental health peer support services to the community in March 2022.