Grant: Meetings Planning & Dissemination Grant: Reproductive and Child Health

We are requesting funding to enable a team of researchers and community partners to hold two formal workshops/consultations to prepare a CIHR Operating Grant application. The aim of the grant is to conduct a national evaluation of an innovative Canadian parenting program: The Parenting Partnership (TPP), designed to improve children's social, emotional and intellectual development by transforming the way we prepare and educate new parents to parent. The objectives of the evaluation are to a) build on existing promising pilot data and assess the program's suitability for diverse communities of parents across Canada, b) train community clinicians in a dozen districts to administer the TPP curriculum and c) measure the impact of the program on participating parents and their children. The cross-disciplinary project team consists of nurses, psychologists, epidemiologists, kinesiologists, statisticians and graduate students from the Health Faculty at York University, Directors of Children's Mental Health Centres, authors of the TPP curriculum, consultants from a First Nations community in Northern Ontario, an expert on parenting from the NICHD, and consulting parents. A minimum of two full meeting days are needed to enable the team to 1) formally address four crucial issues: how to serve and engage fathers, adolescent parents, First Nations, and immigrant communities in this initiative, 2) develop a detailed training plan for community parent educators who will be implementing TPP 3) devise a comprehensive evaluation strategy and 4) plan for the participation of additional colleagues across Canada. We hope to provide accommodation to visiting team members, as well as hold working dinners to maximize available time. It is expected that a comprehensive grant application will result from this collaboration. Furthermore it is expected that a group of graduate students will greatly benefit from being part of this consultative process and grant preparation activity.