• Grow awareness of mental health promotion innovations across the country, including projects involved in the Mental Health Promotion Innovation Fund (MHP-IF) 
• Grow connections with people, knowledge and other resources to support their mental health promotion efforts 
• Grow skills for what and how to learn about and apply promising approaches for mental health promotion 

Helping mental health promotion flourish starts with an understanding of what is mental health promotion. To help grow this awareness, the Hub produced a short video (‘What is Mental Health Promotion’) and made it available before the 2022 symposium. At the opening session, we built on this background by profiling the 20 projects participating in the first phase of the Mental Health Promotion Innovation Fund (MHP-IF). They are mental health promotion in action. The projects both showed and told what they are doing in a virtual Project Gallery and in breakout rooms at the opening session. A short montage of voices and visuals from MHP-IF projects reinforced the many compelling whys for the work we all do.

Participants brought their understanding of what mental health promotion is and what it looks like into sessions that explored actions for helping mental health promotion flourish. Actions and perspectives were explored with keynote speakers, a moderated panel discussion, an online interactive exercise, and breakout room conversations. We heard about the importance of upstream efforts to promote wellbeing, especially to address an ‘echo pandemic’ of mental health in Canada that is affecting some populations much more than others. We heard that the biggest gaps to fill are structural and systemic. To fill them requires fundamental change; shifts in paradigms and mental models for mental health and its promotion. The gaps are fillable. An equity-based approach is essential. Equity is achievable with culture as a foundation for wellness. It is achievable with inclusivity and diversity as drivers and a central focus on community-level action. Indigenous leadership must be honoured and present. Ideas and strategy are useless if not followed by implementation. Helping mental health promotion flourish takes having a larger purpose than ourselves. We can only have this larger purpose if we tend to conditions that help ourselves flourish. 

Consistent with the Hub’s purpose, the role of knowledge in helping mental health promotion flourish was a focus on the final day of the symposium. Background for the online sessions was a written summary of new knowledge across MHP-IF projects during Phase 1, distilled from two rounds of conversations all 20 projects had with the KDE Hub. Project teams animated the findings in breakout room discussions and a panel discussed directions for knowledge mobilization more generally. Ten themes summarized main findings from Phase 1 project stories, including insights on pandemic adaptations, promoting equity and cultural safety, and systemic supports and challenges for growing mental health promotion. The value of learning across diverse projects was reinforced. Optimal value from this learning will take weaving a knowledge mobilization mindset and way of working into all aspects of research, policy and practice. The most promising mindset and approaches for knowledge mobilization are transformative. De-construct colonial knowledge systems. Embrace a broader view of ‘quality evidence’. Privilege relationships. Bring a stance of ‘not knowing’, humility, and generosity. Accept discomfort as dominant paradigms are examined and shift. 

The symposium closed by reinforcing the need for many fundamental changes along with a strong sentiment of hope and optimism for making them. The “hope is real and it is big,” especially with the heightened awareness, commitment and leadership from communities, from policy influencers and makers, from all who gathered for this event, from others who are helping mental health promotion flourish. We are a growing community that will capitalize on a growth phase for mental health promotion, accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic. We are the “power of ones.”