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Spring is a season of renewal and growth. A time when seeds already planted start to grow and thrive. For the Mental Health Promotion Innovation Fund the Spring of 2022 represents renewed commitments to supporting mental health promotion for young Canadians. Projects across the country have entered the second phase of the program with a focus of building on the developmental work of the last two years. The Hub will continue to support these projects and those with shared interests as we work towards mental health promotion that is evidence-informed, sensitive to diverse contexts and cultures, equitable and sustainable.
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Recent highlights
Welcoming new Scientific Co-Directors
This Spring the Hub welcomes new leadership. Our new Scientific Co-Directors are Dr. Alice Schmidt Hanbidge and Dr. Colleen McMillian who are both associate professors in the Renison School of Social Work. Their experiences in community-engaged scholarship and capacity building will help the Hub to continue to thrive. Alice and Colleen look forward to connecting and learning with and from the growing Canadian community with shared interests in mental health promotion. Learn more about them in an announcement from the Hub’s host institution, Renison University College, and through their first blog on the Hub website.
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New resource category: Context for Indigenous Inclusion Lens
The Hub is committed to honouring multiple ways of knowing and doing as well as to decolonization. One way that the Hub acted on these commitments was through the development of the Indigenous Inclusion Lens. This tool was designed to foster conversations, planning and actions toward inclusion of Indigenous voices and knowledge in ways that are respectful and culturally appropriate. Now the Hub has added a new resource category on our website to support the tool. These resources provide context including overviews of Indigenous history in Canada and the need for reconciliation. Learn more about this resource category in a recent blog post.
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Hub tool: Overview of Findings from Project Stories
This tool, newly posted to the Hub developed products section of our website, provides an overview of insights across 20 projects funded during the first phase of the Public Health Agency of Canada’s Mental Health Promotion Innovation Fund (MHP-IF). This phase included two years of project implementation, which coincided with the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic in Canada. The MHP-IF Phase 1 insights can guide future research directions, inform program decisions (e.g., planning, delivery, evaluation), and provide context for advancing mental health promotion policy and system change. For those who attended the 2022 Annual Symposium, this tool will not be new as it was background reading for sessions on knowledge in action for mental health promotion.
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Looking Ahead
May webinar: “Unscripted” – When New Understandings are Unexpected
Mental health promotion can be messy! Even the best articulated participant recruitment strategies, project implementation plans, data collection procedures, and evaluation protocols do not always unfold according to plan. What do we do when new insights lie outside of the margins of our well-conceived plans? Facilitated by the new Scientific Co-Directors, Drs. Alice Schmidt Hanbidge and Colleen McMillan, and together with projects from the MHP-IF this webinar will explore the wonder and beauty of embracing those unexpected moments and missteps as opportunities to be flexible and adaptable while gaining new insights and knowledge.
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June webinar: Health Equity Indicators Tool
Health equity is one of the guiding principles of the MHP-IF. The MHP-IF team at the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) has been updating a Health Equity Indicators Tool (HEIT) to assist projects in strengthening capacity to integrate, monitor and assess impacts related to health equity. Our June webinar will serve as an initial workshop on using the HEIT. It will be led by Andrea Simpson, Policy Analyst from PHAC’s MHP-IF team with invitations to the MHP-IF projects. This webinar will build on a 2021 webinar that explored core concepts, principles, and approaches to health equity and introduced the HEIT. Resources on health equity are available on the Hub website.
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The KDE Hub supports connections and learning amongst those who aspire to optimal mental health promotion for all Canadians. One way we do this is seeking and sharing timely resources, events and research from the field of mental health promotion. Here are a few of the items that have caught our attention recently:
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May 15-19 is the IUHPE World Conference on Health Promotion, on the theme of Promoting policies for health, well-being and equity. This conference is now fully virtual.
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Registration is open for the 2022 Atlantic Policy Forum on Mental Health Promotion which will be a hybrid event, August 22-24. A goal of this annual event is to foster policy actions that influence upstream investment in promoting well-being, resilience, and regenerating connection throughout Atlantic Canada and beyond.
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From the University of Alberta’s Centre for Healthy Communities, Action-Oriented Public Health Resources on Financial Wellbeing & Financial Strain, includes a framework and guidebook to support action on health equity. These resources describe entry points for action for governments and organizations to improve people’s financial circumstances as well as sample indicators for monitoring and assessing action.
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Commissioned to accompany the Chief Public Health Officer’s annual report, Visioning the Future: First Nations, Inuit, and Metis Population and Public Health, was developed by the National Collaborating Centre for Indigenous Health in collaboration with many relevant stakeholders. This report addresses public and population health informed by Indigenous knowledge and traditional practices including in the areas of mental wellness, and social determinants of health.
- The Quebec government has released an inter-ministerial action plan for mental health in Quebec, Uniting together for collective well-being including a focus on promotion and prevention (available in French only; see especially pages 17-25).
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The Canadian Reconciliation Barometer Project has released its first report measuring progress toward Reconciliation and highlighting gaps in understanding between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples in Canada.
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EdCan recently posted an article and podcast describing the role of positive mental health in post-COVID recovery for schools.
Let us know if there are new resources, events or research you would like us to share. We love to hear from you: kdehub@uwaterloo.ca.
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The Knowledge Development and Exchange Hub is dedicated to optimal mental health promotion across Canada. Our niche is supporting projects funded through federal mental health promotion programs and a broader community with shared interests. Learn more at kdehub.ca. |
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