Partnerships

Sue Delanoy, community partner on kidSKAN, has been an advocate for children and youth in Saskatchewan for more than 25 years.
In this kidSKAN interview on our YouTube channel, she talks how circumstances in her home life led her into the field.

One of the services she's advocated for during this time is greater access to high quality, affordable child care. Advocating for child care didn’t start out as her career ambition. She was working for the provincial government, but she found that it was difficult to return to work after the birth of her first child as she found few options for child care. Initially she started her own day home, which led to working for the province again, this time with the child daycare licensing branch.

In the spring of 2011, North East Regional Intersectoral Committee held a regional forum in Melfort on housing entitled "Creating Healthy Environments for Children and Families." Saskatchewan Children’s Advocate Bob Pringle gave the keynote address, on his work on housing and on the foster care reform in Saskatchewan. Len Usiskin from QUINT Community Development spoke about community-based initiatives to address housing issues.

This Thursday, May 19, tune into a webinar that explores "why voters who say they care about the next generation can be so reluctant to spend tax dollars on children."

This webinar is part of the Thursday's Child public policy live and webinar series hosted by Chapin Hall at the University of Chicago, an academic research unit that focuses on policy research that benefits children, families and their communities. It will be streamed live from 7 -8:30 am (Saskatchewan time) at http://www.ustream.tv/channel/urban-institute-events, and archived for later viewing.

Description

KidsFirst is a federally-funded, provincially-run intervention program that gives services and support to vulnerable families in Saskatchewan through home visiting. It was launched in 2002 and is offered in nine areas of the province identified as having “high needs.”

Last fall, an in-depth three-year evaluation of KidsFirst was completed, and kidSKAN has produced a short video for its YouTube channel that introduces KidsFirst and the evaluation. This evaluation was conducted by the Saskatchewan Population Health and Evaluation Research Unit, in partnership with the Saskatchewan government, and it was funded by the Canadian Population Health Initiative, the Government of Saskatchewan, MITACS and the College of Medicine at the University of Saskatchewan.

Congratulations to kidSKAN project manager Fleur Macqueen Smith, who wil be receiving the National Collaborating Centres for Public Health’s Knowledge Translation Graduate Student Award at the Canadian Public Health Association’s annual conference in June for her master’s research on communities of practice.

Fleur interviewed people in two communities of practice to develop a checklist to build effective communities of practice in person and online, which we are using to guide the kidSKAN community of practice; the graphic to the left shows a tag cloud of what one person discussed. The checklist reads: