The Home of Canada’s Evolving Brain Injury Movement.
Click any button below to navigate through our journey and initiatives:
Transforming how Canada understands, prevents,
and responds to brain injury.
The CGB Centre is the umbrella organization that connects Canada’s efforts to recognize and improve the lives of people and families living with brain injuries. Founded in love, loss, and a commitment to change, our initiatives are grounded in lived experience that bridge people, policy, and possibility. Through national and provincial collaboration, we’ve evolved and grown our efforts into three major streams of work:
The BC Consensus on Brain Injury, Mental Health, and Addictions
A research-driven initiative using provincial consensus-building days, lived-experience engagement, and stakeholder collaboration to identify priorities and solutions at the intersections of brain injury, mental health, and addictions, and to drive evidence-informed policy and practice change across British Columbia.
The National Strategy on Brain
A campaign driving a national push for a standalone brain injury strategy through petitions, direct lobbying, and powerful survivor-led storytelling, backed by research, national think tanks, and a broad coalition of organizations, municipalities, and advocates across Canada.
The BC Brain Injury Association (BCBIA)
An education and storytelling hub offering brain injury information, resources, and peer connection, Our goal is to strengthen long-term leadership, advocacy, and public awareness for people impacted by brain injury in B.C. and beyond.
This is where stories become systems,
and systems become change.
Why It Began: A Legacy of Service and Love
CGB Centre for Traumatic Life Losses (CGB Centre) exists because of one life, one family, and a promise that grief would become purpose.
Constable Gerry Breese was a 17‑year veteran of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. On May 19, 1990, while responding to a critical incident on his police motorcycle, Gerry was struck by a car.
He sustained a traumatic brain injury and remained in a coma for four days.
After three weeks in hospital, Gerry returned home, but life was no longer the same. He struggled with changes in personality, capacity, and identity — the invisible impacts so many families experience after brain injury.
Tragically, Gerry died suddenly at home five months later.
His wife, Janelle Breese Biagioni, was left to raise their daughters while navigating the profound and complicated grief that follows catastrophic injury and loss. Rather than turning away from that pain, Janelle chose to transform it.
For more than 35 years…
Janelle has served families and individuals affected by brain injury, trauma, and life‑altering loss. Her work bridges lived experience, policy, systems change, and compassion.
To commemorate the 25th Anniversary of Gerry’s death in 2015, his family and friends came together to create the Constable Gerald Breese Centre for Traumatic Life Losses (CGB Centre) — a place to serve individuals and families impacted by catastrophic loss through death, injury, or other life‑altering events. Janelle’s hope is that the CGB Centre will remain a source of education, comfort, and inspiration for anyone walking the long path of grief and rebuilding.
From that legacy, the CGB Centre and an evolving brain injury movement was born.
From Stories to Systems Change
As the CGB Centre grew, it became clear that personal stories alone were not enough — they were a catalyst for change.
We realized that Canada needed shared language, coordinated leadership, and collaborative frameworks to transform how brain injury is understood and supported.
In 2020, the CGB Centre convened the BC Heads Together Think Tanks: province‑wide conversations with survivors, families, service providers, decision‑makers, and researchers that identified what needed to change.
That work evolved into two major initiatives:
The BC Consensus on Brain Injury, Mental Health, and Addictions
A provincial effort to align lived experience, policy, and practice across British Columbia in the context of brain injury and the intersections of mental health, addictions, homelessness, intimate partner violence, and justice.
The National Strategy on Brain
A pan-Canadian framework calling for coordinated action across health, social services, justice, housing, education, and employment.
Both initiatives were seeded through the values and partnerships first convened by the CGB Centre:
collaboration,
dignity,
prevention,
recovery,
and lifelong support.
What started as advocacy became infrastructure.
The BC Consensus on Brain Injury, Mental Health, and Addictions
The BC Consensus on Brain Injury, Mental Health and Addictions emerged from a clear call to action from the Heads Together Think Tank, a cross‑sector gathering of leaders, practitioners, policymakers, insurers, researchers, and people with lived experience who recognized that British Columbia’s response to brain injury was fragmented and overdue for transformation.
Rather than focusing only on acute care, the Consensus was designed to co-create a shared foundation for how British Columbia responds to brain injury across the lifespan.
It recognizes that brain injury intersects with:
Mental health and substance use
Housing and homelessness
Intimate partner violence
Indigenous health and reconciliation
Corrections and justice
Employment and education
Family and caregiver wellbeing
The BC Consensus brought together people with lived experience, government, service providers, insurers, and researchers to establish principles, priorities, and pathways for a coordinated provincial response.
It positioned British Columbia as a leader in systems‑level brain injury transformation and laid the groundwork for national alignment across Canada.
The National Strategy on Brain Injury
Janelle Breese Biagioni began the pursuit of a National Strategy on Brain Injury in 2017 in partnership with her Member of Parliament, who formally tabled the first Bill in the House of Commons in 2021.
This initiative was further strengthened by the research, collaboration, and leadership of the BC Consensus on Brain Injury, Mental Health and Addictions. What began as a provincial framework revealed a larger truth: Canada needed coordinated, pan-Canadian action.
The findings and momentum generated through the BC Consensus became a national call to action — demonstrating that brain injury is not only a health issue, but a public, social, economic, and human rights responsibility shared across jurisdictions.
This work has directly informed the framework for a National Strategy on Brain Injury, which has achieved all-party support and is currently in its third Bill. The CGB Centre, alongside people with lived experience across Canada and partner organizations, continues to advocate strongly for its adoption and implementation.
Brain injury affects millions of Canadians, yet historically responses have been fragmented, underfunded, and siloed. The National Strategy reframes brain injury as a public health, social, economic, and human rights issue — not simply a medical one.
The BC Brain Injury Association (BCBIA)
The evolution of the CGB Centre always been about reducing fragmentation and strengthening collaboration.
Long before new platforms emerged, the BC Brain Injury Association (BCBIA) had been serving British Columbians affected by brain injury. BCBIA has been incorporated since 1982 and is one of Canada’s longstanding provincial leaders in brain injury advocacy, education, and community support.
At the time, Janelle was serving both as Executive Director of the BC Brain Injury Association and CEO of the CGB Centre. It was proposed that BCBIA be brought under the umbrella of CGB to strengthen alignment, reduce duplication, and create a single, coherent voice for brain injury in British Columbia.
The BCBIA Board agreed and formally dissolved the Association, transferring all assets — including the BCBIA name and the website (brainstreams.ca) — to the CGB Centre. While the CGB Centre remains the legal entity, BC Brain Injury Association (BCBIA) is now the public‑facing name for provincial operations.
The two organizations had already formed a strategic partnership several years earlier. This integration brings that work into a unified structure and shared vision.
Today, under the BCBIA identity, the platform connects:
Knowledge exchange
Cross‑sector collaboration
Innovation and pilot projects
Community engagement
Provincial, national, and international learning
While the BC Consensus and National Strategy provide structure and direction, BCBIA provides the connective tissue — bringing people together to learn, build, and evolve brain injury systems in real time across British Columbia and beyond.
CGB Centre: The umbrella that holds all this work together.
Today, the CGB Centre is the umbrella that holds all this work together.
It is the origin story, the ethical compass, and the connective tissue between people, policy, and possibility.
CGB Centre for Traumatic Life Losses:
- Grounds all initiatives in lived experience
- Bridges personal impact with systems change
- Hosts national and provincial collaboration
- Champions dignity, equity, and inclusion
- Advances innovation across sectors
From the CGB Centre grew:
- The BC Consensus on Brain Injury, Mental Health, and Addictions
- The National Strategy on Brain Injury
- Strategic partnership with BC Brain Injury Association
Each has its own role, but all share a common purpose: transforming how Canada understands, prevents, and responds to brain injury across the lifespan.
Our Philosophy
We believe:
Brain injury is a human rights issue
Brain injury is a traumatic life transition, not a moment in time.
People with lived experience belong at every decision-making table.
Systems must adapt to lives — not force lives to adapt to systems.
Recovery, participation, and dignity are lifelong.
Collaboration is the only path forward.
Our work sits at the intersection of compassion and policy, innovation and community, research and real life.
How to Explore the Ecosystem
CGB Centre for Traumatic Life Losses remains the home of our story and our values.
To explore our active initiatives, visit:
Join the Movement
CGB Centre / BC Brain Injury Association exists because people refused to accept fragmented care and invisible lives.
Whether you are a person with lived or living experience, a family member, policymaker, researcher, clinician, insurer, or community partner — you belong here.
Together, we are shaping a Canada where brain injury is understood, supported, and transformed into opportunity for healing, participation, and justice.