As part of our collaborative mandate, The Sandbox Project is building connections that support leading Canadian researchers as they develop strategies to facilitate the uptake and dissemination of world-class research results.

With our network of partner organizations, we’re helping to share exciting new research findings with families and youth who can use them in their daily lives.

The Sandbox Project is proud to be a Knowledge Mobilization Partner in four outstanding Canadian research initiatives. To learn more, please contact us.

Brock Healthy Youth Project

BHYP (“Be Hype”) is a project being led by a transdisciplinary team of researchers from Brock University and other Canadian and international universities, as well as partner organizations and a youth engagement committee.

The goal of BHYP is to examine the link between health-risk behaviours and adolescent brain development longitudinally.

Adolescence often is characterized as a health paradox because it is a time of extensive increases in physical and mental capabilities, yet mortality and injury rates increase significantly from childhood to adolescence. Health-risk behaviours (e.g., substance use, risky activities, physical inactivity, poor nutrition) are the leading cause of mortality and injuries among youth. In addition, over 70% of mental health problems have their onset between early adolescence and young adulthood, often initially in milder forms, making this age a critical period for increasing our understanding about how these problems can be prevented.

CHILD Cohort Study

The CHILD Cohort Study is a prospective longitudinal birth cohort study. This means that CHILD researchers are actively following the Study participants over time as they grow and develop—from mid-pregnancy into childhood and adolescence. CHILD is designed this way so it can collect information at time points that are considered to be especially critical to the health and development of children.

By following the children prospectively as they grow, as opposed to retrospectively (looking back), CHILD researchers are able to more accurately learn about how different early-life exposures relate to health and disease outcomes.

CHILD findings will influence medical practice, parenting choices, consumer product regulation and policy development—from building codes and household purchasing behaviours to decisions about childbirth and delivery, diet, breastfeeding, cleaning products used in homes, owning a family pet and dealing with stress.

CHILD is the largest multidisciplinary, longitudinal, population-based birth cohort study in Canada and is designed to be one of the most informative studies of its kind in the world.

Healthy Brains, Healthy Lives

Healthy Brains, Healthy Lives (HBHL) is a high profile, high priority multidisciplinary and cross-sectoral initiative located at McGill University. HBHL seeks to improve the lives of Canadians by advancing understanding of how the individual brain functions in health and disease, throughout our lives.

The central vision of the HBHL initiative is to reduce the human and socio-economic burden of psychiatric and neurological illnesses and improve the mental health, quality of life, and productivity of Canadians and people around the world. This will be done by elucidating how the individual brain functions in health, in disease, and throughout our lives using world-leading neuroinformatics integrating genetic, epigenetic, neurophysiological, imaging, behavioural, clinical, social and environmental data.

Solutions for Kids in Pain (SKIP)

Solutions for Kids in Pain (SKIP) is a newly formed national knowledge mobilization network, based at Dalhousie University and co‐led by Children’s Healthcare Canada, that seeks to bridge the gap between current treatment practices and available evidence‐based solutions for children’s pain in Canadian health institutions. SKIP’s vision is healthier Canadians through better pain management for children, with a mission to improve children’s pain management by mobilizing evidence‐based solutions through coordination and collaboration. SKIP brings together Canada’s world‐renowned pediatric pain research community, front‐line knowledge user organizations, and patients and caregivers.

Guided by a diverse and experienced Board, SKIP capitalizes on the engagement of 48 Children’s Healthcare Canada member organizations, over 100 partners, 4 regional hubs (IWK Health Centre- Halifax, Children’s Healthcare Canada- Ottawa, the Hospital for Sick Children-Toronto, Stollery Children’s Hospital- Edmonton), and patients and caregivers (using a “Patients Included” approach) to collaborate and co‐produce interconnected knowledge mobilization activities.