Grant: Project Grant

When perinatal substance use is identified, health and child welfare systems often intervene quickly. Yet current monitoring systems focus on individual risk and rarely account for the caregiving that sustains families when formal systems step in. Across Canada, grandmothers and Matriarchs frequently assume responsibility for children when systems intervene, absorbing financial, emotional, health, and opportunity costs that remain largely invisible in policy and funding decisions. The Nita Survey responds to this gap. Building on leadership from Grandmothers through Mothering Co/Lab, this five-year research initiative develops and implements a new measurement tool designed to quantify the costs borne by kinship caregivers and the costs avoided by formal systems when care is assumed within extended families. The survey will be refined and validated through interviews and structured data collection with grandmothers and Matriarchal caregivers across three contexts: Indigenous governance settings, Black communities, and formal child welfare placements as a comparator. For the first time, this research will generate comparative evidence on who bears the costs of care and how health and child welfare systems rely on unrecognized relational labor. With the First Nations Information Governance Centre serving as data holder, the project operationalizes Indigenous data governance principles and co-develops a community-held, multi-partnered data model. By making visible the economic and social contributions of matriarchal kinship care, the Nita Survey will inform more accountable health and child welfare policy, equitable resource allocation, and system redesign grounded in community realities.