We want all Lanark County youth to have a sense of belonging, optimism, hopefulness, and empowerment through caring relationships and meaningful engagement with their community.
An early focus for this YSUPP project is to strengthen our Icelandic Prevention Model (IPM) coalition by enhancing collaborative governance and deepening youth and family engagement. Since its establishment in 2020, the Planet Youth Lanark County (PYLC) partnership has used findings from Planet Youth student surveys and community engagement events, to identify two key adolescent risk factors: youth feeling unsafe at school and chronic sleep deprivation. Our local data shows strong associations between these risk factors and increased likelihood of substance use, degraded mental/physical health and happiness.
To address these challenges, PYLC will empower youth leadership in the development, implementation, and evaluation of interventions that respond to priorities defined within the IPM methodology. Current initiatives include campaigns to raise awareness about healthy sleep habits, adapting family-based interventions to improve sleep, and facilitating teen participatory research to develop interventions to improve adolescent sleep health. The project will also prioritize input from youth, family and youth-serving organizations to explore why youth do not feel safe, and how this can be addressed by strengthening protective factors in peer groups, leisure, family and/or school domains.
Lead organizations: Planet Youth Lanark County hosted by Open Doors for Lanark Children and Youth
Website: Planet Youth Lanark
Socials: Facebook
Contact: info@planetyouthlanark.ca
Location: Lanark County, Ontario
Located west of the nation’s capitol, Lanark County is home to 9 municipalities (Mississippi Mills, Beckwith, Carleton Place, Perth, Smith Falls, Drummond North Elmsley, Montague, Tay Valley and Lanark Highlands).
This project is funded as part of the Public Health Agency of Canada’s Youth Substance Use Prevention Program (YSUPP). Learn more here.