Afternoon Breakout Description

As you know, The Sandbox Project exists to foster a collective energy to generate solutions across sectors, disciplines and fields of expertise for accelerating improvements in child and youth health in Canada. Recent studies and releases have shown moderate improvement in the international benchmarks for Canadian child and youth health however, we must focus on the goal of making Canada the healthiest place in the work for children and youth. The afternoon session will focus participants on the following question: In light of recent international measurements of Canadian child and youth health, what about our collaborations needs to change and how in order to significantly improve Canada’s performance in influencing and resourcing the healthy development of all Canadian children and youth?

Initially, there may be as many answers to this question as there will be participants present. To give all of them a full airing, our assembly will sub-divide into small groups of 6 or so. Each sub-group will consider this question from a vantage point of its choosing. The range of vantage points will be determined during the organizing plenary at 1pm by those participants who voluntarily declare theirs along with an offer to lead a discussion of it. (To ensure that the interests of all Canadian children are represented in our deliberations, discussions leaders will be asked to align their discussions with one of childhood’s 3 major transition time, ‘baby’, ‘child,’ or ‘young adult’ or, if not possible, ‘all ages’.) 

The remaining participants will join in the sub-group whose discussion angle is of greatest interest to them. They will remain with that sub-group for the afternoon or circulate among two or more based on what interests them most. All sub-groups will follow a template to report their single, major finding back to the plenary. The full group will then organize the results as its response to the question, possibly in the form of its priorities for the coming year, to the Sandbox Project and its stakeholders. The first to hear the organized results will be Minister Candice Bergen in the wrap-up session at 4pm.

If you know now that you wish to lead a small group discussion in response to the key question, please contact Scott Watson of The Sandbox Project to discuss the particulars.