Grant: Planning and Dissemination Grant - Institute Community Support

The health of our planet is in crisis. For a future that sustains all planetary life, we must respond with urgency and creativity across political and epistemic boundaries. Convergence research - wholistic sensing and seeing approaches that provide a creative response to systems challenges - originated with Indigenous Peoples. While every Indigenous Knowledge system is unique, their collective approaches to planetary health offer a transdisciplinary and archipelagic (islands) framework to systems-level planetary challenges. In Fall 2021, we began to develop our ideas for a series of coordinated "island projects" that will unite around Indigenous meanings of "good relations" and reciprocity frameworks across Indigenous-led research-creation-action clusters. We have held 10 virtual Round Table discussions and one face-to-face meeting of the core Principal Investigator Collective (June 12-16, 2022). We now want to come together for a face-to-face Gathering of our entire team to affirm our commitments to each other and the lands we are a part of through an "Indigenous-Led Resurgence for Planetary Health Governance" Research-Creation-Action Project Proposal. The objectives of this Planning Grant application align with the Funding Opportunity: to support planning activities, partnership development and to increase understanding of the health research landscape that will contribute to the advancement of research consistent with the mandate of CIHR; and to support activities and events that ensure the inclusion and meaningful representation of individuals who have historically faced barriers in the research ecosystem. Moreover, because we are as interested in documenting our processes as we are in sharing our eventual research outcomes, we are seeking support for a dissemination activity: to record our Gathering for sharing purposes amongst those who cannot attend due to vaccine restrictions