“There is no power for change greater than a community discovering what it cares about.”  Margaret Wheatley

Introducing new KDE Hub Scientific Co-Directors

Alice Schmidt Hanbidge	Colleen McMillan
Alice brings social work practice experience centered on promoting child, youth and family mental health resilience in schools and communities, supporting incarcerated adults, and advocating for trauma-informed child welfare reform. Her interprofessional research activities and collaborative teaching practices effectively contribute to the equitable advancement of diverse program delivery and mental health promotion.	Colleen’s experience spans clinical, community, and policy domains focusing on mental health practice, advocacy, and reform in primary and tertiary settings for children, youth, and their families. Her research is interprofessional and transglobal with a focus on equity and inclusion in social services and mental health promotion.

As the incoming KDE Hub Scientific Co-Directors, we are passionate about positive mental health change as is the KDE Hub team. Individually and collectively, we want to contribute to mental health promotion that is evidence informed, sensitive to diverse context and cultures, equitable, and sustainable.

To learn more about the experience and interests each of us brings to our new roles with the KDE Hub,  please see an announcement from Dr. Wendy Fletcher, President and Vice-Chancellor of the Hub’s host institution, Renison University College.

Our vision and plans for the KDE Hub

Help it flourish – grow awareness, grow connections, grow skills, grow diverse knowledges!

The KDE Hub will continue to support funded projects in using evidence to develop, implement, and sustain promising approaches, including studying what is working, for whom, under what conditions. We will continue to facilitate sharing knowledge and discerning policy implications within the Canadian mental health promotion community.

As we move forward, Hub supports will continue to:

• create new knowledge across funded projects that is relevant, credible, and timely;
• build community and capacity amongst the projects and others who share their interests, and;
• strengthen systemic supports for sustaining and scaling up promising approaches to mental health promotion.

The Hub embraces expanding work started in phase 1 with the Public Health Agency of Canada’s Mental Health Promotion Innovation Fund (MHP-IF) projects to adapt, test, and scale up promising and effective mental health approaches. We look to expand our work to support how mental health promotion is shaped by local contexts and issues, while responding to mental health needs in the pandemic and recovery context.

We welcome all who want to address structural and social determinants of mental health to join Hub activities, such as webinars, social media and our annual symposium, with our mandate to bridge research, policy and practice for mental health promotion to develop evergreen knowledge mobilization strategies.

We are grateful to the founding Scientific Director of the KDE Hub, Dr. Barb Riley, for her passionate leadership, inspirational efforts and vision to guide the KDE Hub.

Join us!

Please reach out to Dr. Alice Schmidt Hanbidge at ashanbidge@uwaterloo.ca and Dr. Colleen McMillan at c7mcmill@uwaterloo.ca at the Renison-hosted KDE Hub for Mental Health Promotion, and join us toward growing mental health promotion in Canada! We invite your knowledge, experience and opinions in shaping the next chapter of the innovative work of the KDE Hub.

 

Written by Alice Schmidt Hanbidge and Colleen McMillan, KDE Hub Scientific Co-Directors