Vision

To help forge a healthy and flourishing future for every community.

Mission

To promote equitable, sustainable, and healthy communities across Alberta and Canada through multi-sectoral collaboration, cross-disciplinary engaged research and capacity building, reconciliation, and generation of evidence to inform policies and practices.

Guiding principles

  • Promote healthy communities research and share research outcomes to advance practice, policy, and research. 
  • Advocate for supporting healthy communities through better use of existing knowledge, data, and tools.
  • Partner with communities; government; non-governmental, nonprofit and grassroots organizations; First Nations, Métis, and Inuit groups; private sector organizations; and researchers from other disciplines to build capacity and achieve shared goals.
  • Bridge organizations, people, places/communities, knowledge and research across multiple disciplines and sectors.
  • Engage scientific and practice expertise and insights from lived experiences to build and enhance supportive environments.
  • Mobilize research, community, and/or practice-based knowledge to co-develop action-focused policies, practices, and programs/services.
  • Utilize innovative and rigorous research techniques, data and tools (respecting data sovereignty and adhering to OCAP® principles), and theoretical foundations to guide research, policy, and practice.
  • Address community concerns related to physical, mental, social, and environmental health, as well as the built environment and new technologies that impact health, wellbeing, and quality of life.

Core values

  • Collaboration: We adopt a collaborative model that draws on a broad range of expertise and practice-based knowledge.
  • Reconciliation: We acknowledge the past and continuing harms of colonization. We are committed to engaging and working with First Nations, Métis, and Inuit elders, knowledge keepers, and communities to work towards reconciliation by building relationships, co-creating solutions, and centering the voices of First Nations, Métis, and Inuit Peoples in our projects and initiatives.
  • Integrity: We operate with full transparency following principles of social and health equity, mutual respect, communication and trust among academic, non-academic, and community partners.
  • Sustainability: We promote longer-term, meaningful social and policy change alongside environmental stewardship.
  • Research excellence: We strive to achieve excellence as a leader in rigorous research that promotes healthy communities and associated policies and practices.
  • Health and quality of life: We recognize that the health of individuals and populations is shaped by the social, structural, commercial, and ecological determinants of health. With this in mind, our work takes place in a variety of sectors and settings, such as regions, communities, schools, and workplaces.
  • Health equity, diversity, and inclusion: We aim to foster social inclusion and belonging and to achieve wellness for all by considering race, ethnicity, gender, and social roles as well as vulnerable and/or oppressed peoples.
  • Systems-based approaches: We recognize that community and population health is dynamic and rooted in multiple systems including local contexts; therefore, we undertake a systems-based approach to addressing complex problems.

 

The Centre for Healthy Communities adopts a broad definition of community, which includes formal and informal administrative or interest-based communities (e.g., municipality, group of engaged residents, school, workplace, organization, First Nations, Métis, and Inuit communities, equity-deserving communities).