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Left: Darry Willier Right: Michael Aubin (Image Credit: Everyting GP staff/Nathaniel leigh)
By Nathan Leigh
Community

Grande Prairie residents launching non-profit for post recovery trauma victims

Nov 5, 2026 | 2:25 PM

A new non-profit organization in Grande Prairie aims to help addicts and trauma victims find their footing after recovery.

Darry Willier is a Driftpile First Nations man and is using his over 50 years of experience living with personal and generational trauma to help people who have completed addiction recovery find stable housing and a path forward through the Napichew program.

“They fall from the treatment process into fighting for your lives, into the aspects of no stability, no purpose,” Willier says. “Nothing for us to be able to train in the way that [treatment staff and counsellors] taught us. How they progress in this trauma that they understand and generational trauma and things like that.”

The program, named after Willier’s father, will provide a place to stay while participants, or as Willier calls them Warriors, undergo self-directed care and learning.

“[The program will offer] One bedroom, a tiny home, employment opportunities, to be able to get skilled trades,” he says. “To be able to have that documentation, to have their hours. To say that when they leave our program, they have already got two years into education towards a diploma and two years into trades. We give them the opportunities to find reconnection to their culture. To what’s missing within themselves.”

Willier says right now he and his team are working to spread awareness of the program and gather more volunteers and funding to construct a full facility around 2029.

“The funding that we are trying to go after is a one-time bill,” he says. “After five years we want to become a self-sustaining ecosystem. We’re working on going towards a five-year data collection because this has never been done before. This isn’t anything that’s been recorded. Now we’re going actually after scientific and humanitarian and environmental [studies]. Into ‘OK, now how do we advance? How do we move forward?’”

You can learn more about the Napichew program at their new website: Napichew.com.

by Nathan Leigh