Well Living House Verified listing Verified listing

    Description

    Well Living House is an action research centre for Indigenous infants, children, and their families' health and well-being. Our focus is on gathering, using, sharing, and protecting Indigenous health and well-being knowledge and practices.  We draw on both Indigenous and public health knowledge to inform cutting edge scholarship and best practices. At the heart is an aspiration to be a place where Indigenous people can gather, understand, and share what it means to be a healthy child, family, and community – building a “Well Living House”.

    The long-term vision of the Well Living House is that every Indigenous infant will be born into a context that promotes health and well-being – at the individual, family and community levels. We are actively working toward achieving this vision by improving health policies, services, and programs through applied knowledge work. Current priority research topics include urban Indigenous health assessments and enhancing health and social services; best practices in Indigenous parent-infant-toddler health promotion; and Indigenous midwifery and reproductive health.

    The WLH conducts research, advances community-based knowledge and practices, and provides student and practitioner training. Both Indigenous and mainstream academic knowledge and expertise inform the work of the Well Living House. We respect both Indigenous and non-Indigenous ways of knowing and doing. Collectively, we strive to build on synergies between the two, and to move beyond historic/current community-university tensions.

    Who is Involved

    Wāhkōhtowin (Kinship):

    We are a group of Indigenous health researchers, health practitioners and community grandparents who are working together to improve the health and well-being of Indigenous infants, children, and their families through applied knowledge work.

    Location
    Closed
    Open hours today: 9:00 am - 5:00 pm Toggle weekly schedule

    • Monday

      9:00 am - 5:00 pm

    • Tuesday

      9:00 am - 5:00 pm

    • Wednesday

      9:00 am - 5:00 pm

    • Thursday

      9:00 am - 5:00 pm

    • Friday

      9:00 am - 5:00 pm

    • Saturday

      Closed

    • Sunday

      Closed

      • January 2, 2025 10:40 pm local time

    Programs and Services

    What We Do

    Asokāpāýawih (Resolve):

    The Well Living House will focus on applied Indigenous knowledge translation. This means getting relevant and useful public health and Indigenous traditional knowledge to health practitioners, program managers and policy-makers. And it means helping them to use this knowledge to improve care and services for Indigenous infants, children and families.

    The Well Living House:

    1. Works to address the serious deficits in health service, vital statistics, health status, and health surveillance data for Indigenous infants, children and families.This includes:
    • Ongoing partnership work with Indigenous communities and organizations to develop new datasets and linkages;
    • Assessment of the quality and community relevance of existing data sets;
    • Advocacy for higher quality data and data systems;
    • Advocacy for Indigenous governance and management of Indigenous data sets;
    • Using this data to facilitate the planning and evaluation of health services and programs by Indigenous communities and organizations.
    1. Identifies and contributes to best practices for improving Indigenous health. This includes drawing from both Indigenous and public health knowledge to:
    • Work with existing funding structures to develop and implement novel community-based methods of program and service evaluation;
    • Develop, implement, and evaluate new pilot programs and/or services;
    • Scale up identified best practices across Indigenous contexts.
    1. Works to advance Indigenous Knowledge Translation.

    We identify best practices and use innovative methods for gathering and sharing knowledge with community partners (e.g. social networks, Respondent Driven Sampling, concept mapping).

    We are also working to build and share an accessible and culturally secure repository of knowledge, to help put traditional knowledge and community-based approaches at the foundation of Indigenous health care.

    We serve as a bridge between Indigenous science and knowledge work and western science and knowledge work (e.g. we are developing partnerships that support Indigenous governance and management of Indigenous knowledge and data). These bridging processes draw on cultural values of exchange. We will call on our Elders and work through ceremony as required.

    1. Builds research and community capacity.

    We will provide training and other forms of capacity building through community-based research methods.

    Research topics will include: Culture based parenting, infant and toddler health promotion, neuroplasticity and child development, trauma and recovery, Indigenous midwifery and sexual/reproductive health. Other topics will be determined in time through community consultation.

    Research approaches will include: Solutions-based science (e.g. intervention studies, evaluation, integrated knowledge translation, building maternal/child cohorts and databases, establishing a shared knowledge repository).

    For more information about what we do, please see projects.

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