Improving the health and wellbeing of Canada’s young people was the focus of a national conference on Thursday that brought together many of the country’s leading child and youth health organizations.
The Sandbox Project hosted its 6th national conference and workshop on January 21st, 2016 at TELUS House in Toronto, creating a venue for experts and conference participants to work together on strategies to improve health outcomes for children and youth throughout Canada.
During the morning plenary session, leadership of The Sandbox Project provided updates on progress made in several key areas over the past year, including the launch of the EduTOX Video Challenge. Running until March 21, 2016, EduTOX is a new video contest that will give young people a voice to promote awareness and action on hazardous substances – and a chance to be nationally recognized for their leadership.
The conference afternoon saw multi-disciplinary groups engaged in strategic discussions to identify key actions we can take now to tackle some of the sector’s biggest challenges. This year’s conference keynote was delivered by Ric Young, Distinguished Visiting Professor of Social Innovation at Ryerson University. He led an engaging discussion about collaboration, innovation and transformation, and encouraged the assembled participants to rise to the challenge of the possible when it comes to moving the dial on child and youth health in Canada.
“With well over 150 representatives from a broad range of national, regional and local child and youth-related organizations in the room, the conference was a real opportunity to explore how we can be more effective as a sector and accelerate to solutions,” said Christine Hampson, President and CEO of The Sandbox Project. The discussion was timely as the Federal/Provincial/Territorial Health Ministers were meeting the same day in Vancouver to start discussions related to renewing Canada’s Health Accord. “Child and youth health and wellbeing must be on the Health Accord agenda,” said Hampson.
The Sandbox Project 2016 Conference was made possible by TELUS, the AstraZeneca Young Health Program, Yellow Pages, Kinross, Dream, Innovative Medicines Canada, the Mental Health Commission of Canada and Santis Health.
About The Sandbox Project
The vision of The Sandbox Project is to make Canada the healthiest place on Earth for children and youth to grow up. As a catalyst for collaboration, Sandbox is focused on improving children and youth health outcomes with respect to injury prevention, growing healthy bodies, mental health and the environment.