COMMUNITY OF PRACTICE

Health and allied professionals who support BC K-12 schools in their work to prevent, delay and reduce substance-related harms for youth and promote youth well-being. This may include:

• Any staff working in the areas of youth mental health and/or addictions

• Any health workers engaged with school-aged youth 

• Any Health Authority professionals working with school- and district-based staff (e.g., Health Promoting Schools staff)

This CoP will  support your practice as you:

• Learn from and connect with colleagues in your region pursuing similar efforts;

• Connect to the latest research, resources, promising practices, and BC initiatives;

• Share what you’ve learned, ask questions and improve understanding;

• Connect to people with specific expertise/experience related to K-12 student wellbeing;

• Review comprehensive school health approaches that have improved student wellbeing in BC’s K-12 schools, with a focus on grades 6-12;

• Hear what worked and what didn’t from others doing similar work.

The facilitated one-hour CoP virtual meeting will allow you to gain insight from other participants. Session focus will be determined by participants, with different participants having the opportunity to share learning or seek others’ input to guide their journey.  

The sessions will be facilitated by Cindy Andrew and Art Steinmann with occasional support from other specialists on the project team.

The focus of this community of practice is to support approaches that have been shown to be effective in preventing, delaying  and reducing substance-related harms for youth. The CoP is a scheduled opportunity to share practices and resources that enhance a comprehensive school health approach to youth substance use. In particular, this CoP will:

• Provide a safe space for members to troubleshoot situations and share lessons learned from others’ experiences. 

• Continuously identify ways to support each others’ practice

• Foster culturally safe, gender-inclusive, trauma-informed, strengths-based practices.  

• Be supported by web-based resources and be co-led by facilitators with decades of experience in comprehensive, school-based health and substance use related efforts. 

• Gather information to identify knowledge and resource gaps to better support the public health and K-12 education systems to strengthen students’ resilience and prevent, delay and reduce substance-related harms for youth.