Grant: Master's Award: Canada Graduate Scholarships

This project will involve the development of a program efficacy measure that meets the needs of Aboriginal communities. This research training funding will support my work to develop an assessment tool that can be used by Aboriginal communities to assess the efficacy of youth wilderness programs. This tool will be applicable to any Aboriginal group that is delivering a program involving a wilderness component, and designed in a manner that allows individual communities to tailor the measure to suit their unique needs. This tool will be comprised of two components. The first part - the core of the tool - will be applicable to all communities and programs. The second part will allow communities to modify the evaluation to fit the particular content of their youth programs. Currently there is a significant health gap between Aboriginal people and the rest of the population. On almost any measure of health and well-being, Aboriginal people fare worse than other Canadians. In response, Aboriginal communities are mounting programs that aim to improve their health. In the Yukon Territory, for example, all First Nations have "on-the-land" programs for their youth. The content of these programs varies from one community to the next, from programs that concentrate on traditional food gathering and preparation, or traditional medicine, to wilderness safety and survival skills. What the programs share, however, is a need for evaluation - a tool that could be used by all communities, and yet also address the unique features of individual programs would support the goal of assessing Aboriginal youth wilderness programs. This tool would offer a way to communicate the efficacy of these youth programs in general and to document the specific benefits of particular programs.