Alberta Family Wellness Initiative

All across the province of Alberta, Canada, people are talking about early brain development. They work in government, health care, mental health, addiction treatment, and early education. They live in cities, suburbs, oil boomtowns, and Indigenous communities. Together, they are making changes based on their understanding of early childhood and brain development that they believe will improve the well-being of all Albertans. This phenomenon did not happen by accident.

In 2007, Alberta was facing a now all too common health crisis—increasing rates of substance abuse and addiction and mental health issues among its residents—combined with a lack of adequate comprehensive, integrated programs to address these issues. In searching for information that could help address these issues and achieve population-level change, leaders of the Alberta-based Palix (formerly Norlien) Foundation discovered the scientific knowledge about early childhood development on the Center’s website. “We believed there was a connection between childhood experiences and later adult health outcomes, but was there science to validate that?” recalls Nancy Mannix, chair and patron of the foundation. “When we found this work, it was a foundational piece of what we needed.”

Mannix also recognized that sharing that message with all of the people in Alberta who play important roles in addressing the crisis—policymakers, researchers, practitioners working in the medical, mental health, and social services fields, educators, and more—would be very challenging because these fields were extremely siloed. Another obstacle was lack of public belief in the connection between early childhood development, experiences, and relationships with lifelong learning, behavior, and health. To take on this seemingly uphill battle, the Palix Foundation created the Alberta Family Wellness Initiative (AFWI). Since its founding in 2007, AFWI has become a driving force in Canada and beyond for using what we know about early brain development to address a range of community challenges affecting both children and adults.

How has AFWI done this? Through a strategy they call “knowledge mobilization.” Much of AFWI’s work has focused on providing the infrastructure and facilitation to bring together practitioners and policymakers from across Alberta with scientists from the National Scientific Council on the Developing Child and other experts to enable them to collaborate and develop science-based, innovative solutions for the fields of health, justice, education, and human services. This program has involved cohorts of hundreds of Alberta’s leaders and encompassed several conferences and symposia, including the 2013 “Accelerating Innovation Symposium: Telling the Brain Story to Inspire Action.” At this event, AFWI facilitated the formation of Innovation Teams, which brought the challenge of translating knowledge into action back to participants’ own work priorities and agendas. Through knowledge mobilization, AFWI has trained an “army” of change agents who continue to share the message of the importance of early childhood development with their communities and who are transforming the ways in which they and their colleagues work.

Special Relationship with the Center

AFWI and the Center on the Developing Child began partnering in 2008, and AFWI then became part of the growing Frontiers of Innovation community. The Center had published a series of working papers on early childhood development and had worked with the FrameWorks Institute, a communications research firm, to develop a “core story” of brain development. This core story translated the science of early brain development into a compelling narrative that could help public policy leaders in the U.S. apply the science to important decisions.

AFWI recognized the potential impact of this science for Alberta and worked with FrameWorks to research how Albertans might think about it differently. Together, they uncovered some important distinctions, particularly with how Albertans—known in Canada as a conservative province—view solutions for mental health issues. Where Americans lean toward finding private solutions, Albertans believe in an interdependent approach that involves families, communities, business, and government. Using this context-specific understanding, AFWI and FrameWorks revised the Center’s core story to become the “Brain Story” in Alberta.

The Brain Story has been the fuel behind AFWI’s major initiatives to educate Alberta’s political and systems leaders, practitioners, and the general public about the importance of early development, relationships, and experiences on lifelong learning, behavior, and health. This work has encompassed an extensive portfolio of activities—from producing new multimedia products, to creating professional development resources, to gathering change agents together through events, and more.

In a true example of distributed leadership, AFWI has expanded the impact of the science of early childhood development in Alberta in ways that the Center alone could not have achieved. Working together with the Center and FrameWorks, and through its network of change agents, AFWI has taken the science, adapted the messaging for the people of Alberta, and shared the Brain Story widely across the province to drive real change—and the results are beginning to become apparent in both policy and practice. “Those brain-to-policy implications are quite well understood within the government of Alberta,” says Shannon Marchand, Deputy Minister, Community and Social Services, “which I think speaks to the success the Foundation has been having.”

Here are just a few examples of the impact AFWI has had:

• Major policy documents produced by the government of Alberta have been strongly influenced by AFWI’s work, including a health report that incorporated the core story of early childhood development and used it as evidence for the need to invest more in the early years, and a new addiction and mental health strategy that took a more comprehensive, lifelong prevention and treatment approach.
• A new province-wide initiative to support the well-being, security, education, and health of all children in Alberta was launched, called “Together We Raise Tomorrow: An Alberta Approach to Early Childhood Development.”
• The Brain Story has been incorporated into Alberta’s Health Services early childhood and parenting resources and in family justice services provided by Alberta’s provincial court system.
• The government of Alberta now requires potential human services contractors to commit to using the science of early childhood development in the delivery of their services.

What We’ve Learned

Population-level change does not happen overnight. AFWI has made significant efforts to evaluate its progress to date and to learn from its experiences so that it can adjust and adapt its strategy for later phases of its work. Some of the lessons learned so far include:

• Sharing knowledge wasn’t enough for true knowledge mobilization; it was crucial for AFWI to also focus on turning that knowledge into action to have the impact it envisioned. Part of that strategy led AFWI to develop its extensive suite of multimedia tools and resources, with help and consultation from the Center and FrameWorks.
• Change agents are the key to influencing policy and practice at a systems level. With the right tools, support, and community, individuals feel empowered to take the Brain Story knowledge, spread it through their own home organizations and systems, and help ensure that policy and practice decisions are informed by brain science.
• Change agents are also reporting significant changes on an individual level. Direct service providers have reported changing their approach to working with clients and patients. And, researchers have made changes to their research programs by thinking about the practical implications of their work and taking into consideration the needs of the people who may benefit from it.
• AFWI’s commitment to reinforcing the relationships and activities throughout the change management process has been critically important to ensuring engagement and uptake of knowledge into practice. To learn more, see Embedding the Brain Story: To Catalyze Sustainable Change for Children and Families.

Other Key AFWI Projects

Core Story Tool Kit—To support the change agents being cultivated through the knowledge mobilization program, AFWI developed a library of helpful resources, including videos, presentation slides, learning cards, and posters for sharing the core concepts of brain architecture, serve-and-return interaction, toxic stress, and executive function skills.

Brain Story Certification Course—AFWI developed this free, online professional development resource for anyone working in the health, human services, education, or judicial sectors. In addition to the core concepts of the Brain Story, the course develops an understanding of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), addiction treatments, and mental health interventions.

Change in Mind: Applying Neurosciences to Revitalize Communities—This three-year initiative (a collaboration between AFWI and the U.S.-based Alliance for Strong Families and Communities) was designed as a “learning laboratory” for testing and evaluating how the latest advances in neuroscience can be applied to drive policy and systems change. Fifteen sites from across the United States and Alberta province, varying in size, service orientation, population reach, and sphere of influence, were selected for the Change in Mind cohort. Through convenings, webinars, technical assistance, and tools, cohort sites were trained in the science of early childhood development, communications framing, innovation, and applying the science to policy and practice.

The Brain Architecture Game—In a collaboration between AFWI, the Center on the Developing Child, the National Scientific Council on the Developing Child, the University of Southern California Media & Behavioral Health Center, and FrameWorks Institute, the Brain Architecture Game was developed as a tool to help policymakers, community and business leaders, health and education service providers, and government officials understand the science of early brain development. The hands-on, interactive game allows participants to build brain structures based on foundational principles of neuroscience and see how they are influenced by environments and experiences.