Grant: Planning Grants-Priority Announcement:Partnerships for Health System Improvement

Challenges associated with entering and exiting life on the street are inextricably linked to mental health. By far the largest barrier to improving the circumstances of street-involved youth is the profound difficulty of engaging these youth in helping relationships and services. Our objective is to bring together a national group of researchers and decision makers who are committed to preparing a grant application for the Fall 2011 CIHR - PHSI competition. The proposed submission to PHSI will implement and evaluate the effectiveness of a Resilience and Strengths-based Intervention to effectively engage youth to make a commitment to: develop trusting relationships; adopt healthy behaviours for change; and ultimately create an attainable plan to exit the street, while simultaneously addressing psychological needs amongst at-risk and unstably housed street-involved youth. The proposed two day planning meeting will enable our partnership group to achieve overall consensus regarding: research questions & hypotheses; outcome variables of interest; and research design. In addition, our partnership group will determine how best to adapt the Resilience and Strengths-based Intervention content and delivery methods for youth who are most challenging to engage. Creating a successful partnership with researchers, decision makers, policy makers and users of research is essential to develop a well designed research study which simultaneously integrates effective knowledge exchange. If the intervention is shown to be effective, a productive partnership will be central to facilitating up-take of this intervention to service providers across a range community settings within Canada and the United States.