Special issue of the Canadian Journal of Public Health on Disparities
Topics in this CIHR funded issue include health literacy, aboriginal health and the delivery of health care services.

RESEARCH



Examples of COMPREHENSIVE APPROACHES to alleviating disadvantage

Community Schools - US
From the Coalition for Community Schools website
A community school is both a place and a set of partnerships between the school and other community resources. Its integrated focus on academics, health and social services, youth and community development and community engagement leads to improved student learning, stronger families and healthier communities. Schools become centers of the community and are open to everyone – all day, every day, evenings and weekends.Using public schools as hubs, community schools bring together many partners to offer a range of supports and opportunities to children, youth, families and communities. Partners work to achieve these results:

• Children are ready to learn when they enter school and every day thereafter. All students learn and achieve to high standards.
• Young people are well prepared for adult roles in the workplace, as parents and as citizens.
• Families and neighborhoods are safe, supportive and engaged.
• Parents and community members are involved with the school and their own life-long learning.

Community Schools - Canada
In Canada, the Saskatchewan Community Schools Association provides links to information through its newsletters and other resources. There are over 100 designated Community Schools in Sasketchewan. The current copy of their newsletter, with an overview of the lobbying efforts of the organization with government, and the commitment of staff, parents, and partners involved, is available by emailing Delphine Melchert, President at: DMelchert@srsd119.ca.

Harlem Program Brings Services Together (New York Times, Sept 5-08)
Poor children grow into poor adults because they are never able, either at home or at school, to acquire the abilities and resources they need to compete in a high-tech service-driven economy — and Heckman emphasizes that those necessary skills are both cognitive (the ability to read and compute) and noncognitive (the ability to stick to a schedule, to delay gratification and to shake off disappointments). The good news, Heckman says, is that specific interventions in the lives of poor children can diminish that skill gap — as long as those interventions begin early (ideally in infancy) and continue throughout childhood. Some of the most successful intervention programs share certain characteristics — they start early, focus on the families that need them the most and provide intensive support. Many of the interventions work with parents to make home environments more stimulating; others work directly with children to improve their language development (a critical factor in later school success). All of them, Neuman says, demonstrate impressive results. The problem right now is that the programs are isolated and scattered across the country, and they are usually directed at only a few years of a child’s life, which means that their positive effects tend to fade once the intervention ends.
This is where Geoffrey Canada comes in. He runs the first and so far the only organization in the country that pulls together under a single umbrella integrated social and educational services for thousands of children at once. Canada’s agency, the Harlem Children’s Zone, has a $58 million budget this year, drawn mostly from private donors; it currently serves 8,000 kids in a 97-block neighborhood of Harlem. (I’ve spent the last five years reporting on his organization’s work and its implications for the country.) Canada shares many of the views of the education reformers — he runs two intensive K-12 charter schools with extended hours and no union contract — but at the same time he offers what he calls a “conveyor belt” of social programs, beginning with Baby College, a nine-week parenting program that encourages parents to choose alternatives to corporal punishment and to read and talk more with their children. As students progress through an all-day prekindergarten and then through a charter school, they have continuous access to community supports like family counseling, after-school tutoring and a health clinic, all designed to mimic the often-invisible cocoon of support and nurturance that follows middle-class and upper-middle-class kids through their childhoods. The goal, in the end, is to produce children with the abilities and the character to survive adolescence in a high-poverty neighborhood, to make it to college and to graduate.

Healthy Schools - UK
From the website,
The National Healthy Schools Program takes a whole school approach to physical and emotional well-being, and focuses on four core themes:

• Personal, Social & Health Education
• Healthy Eating
• Physical Activity
• Emotional Health & Wellbeing

The whole school approach involves working with children and young people, parents, school staff and the whole school community to provide a solid foundation from which developments and improvement are embedded in a systematic way. These processes contribute to the physical and emotional development of all members of the school community.

• 96% of schools in the United Kingdom have joined the program, 56% have achieved healthy school status, and the program is currently conducting a multi-year evaluation.

Intervention in Disadvantaged Schools - Quebec
New Approaches, New Solutions: fostering success for Secondary Students in Disadvantaged Areas, is a government program of intervention adopted in over 200 schools in Quebec. Click here to learn more about the project, and itsgoals to partner with local and regional communities, provide better support to parents and schools, and guarantee equal opportunties for students.

Hamilton Roundtable for Poverty Reduction - Hamilton, Ontario
The HRPR is a community-wide effort to tackle the problem of poverty in Hamilton and promote prosperity for all Hamiltonians. A number of different aspects of the HRPR have been written about. See the separate page on the Hamilton initiative that is attached to this page.

Educational, Planning, Policy & Training Resources on Comprehensive Approaches

Crossing Sectors- Experiences in Intersectorial Action
(Public Health Agency of Canada, 2007)
The paper provides an overview of approaches to intersectoral action at the global, sub-regional, national, sub-national, and community levels.