Grant: Planning and Dissemination Grant - Institute Community Support

Being a chronic victim of bullying is a well-known precursor to mental health problems and to youth suicides. These are among the priority concerns of the Institute for Aboriginal Health and community-relevant prevention strategies are needed to improve these concerns. However, inequities in access to programs and resources that have been developed to support community- and school-based health promotion are stark in rural and remote First Nations, Metis and Inuit communities. Indeed, efforts to implement programs that show the ability to improve outcomes for children and youth face serious challenges. Indigenous communities, in particular, require opportunities and often support to adapt resources - which are typically developed in university-community collaborations in urban settings - to local traditions, values, needs and service capacity. The proposed dissemination meeting 1) will review the evidence-based WITS Programs resources (www.witsprogram.ca) designed to create responsive communities for the prevention of bullying and peer victimization and 2) will evaluate the Programs relevance for First Nations communities in British Columbia. Outcomes of this meeting will be recommendations for points of adaptation that enhance cultural relevance and take account of service delivery capacity of Aboriginal communities while retaining essential principals and kernels of action of this evidenced-based program. The meeting is proposed by a well-established partnership: The WITS Program Partnership received the 2013 CIHR Partnership Award for its extensive dissemination work in also collaboration with the RCMP, Red Cross, the PREVNET National Center for Excellence, the Rock Solid Foundation (a not for profit group) and more than 500 schools and communities across Canada. We will be joined in the proposed meeting by leaders from the RCMP and Indigenous communities across BC. Each has been or will be locally identified as key representatives of their communities.