Empowering Change
Transforming knowledge into action for a sustainable and equitable future within planetary boundaries.
The Initiatives We’re Bringing to Life
Explore the transformative programs we are designing to support health workers, scholars, and communities in achieving wellbeing and sustainability.
Creating platforms for dialogue and collaboration among communities to address local planetary health challenges.
These Programs are Under Construction
Convening
POWER will serve as a secretariat for The Canadian Coalition for Planetary Health and a Wellbeing Society, an emerging coalition of health professionals, scholars and organisations.
Grounded in an ethic of respect and sacred reciprocity with nature, our vision is that Canada and sovereign Indigenous Nations, provinces, territories, and municipalities become a well-being society explicitly committed to improving the well-being of all life while living within planetary boundaries.
Policy and Advocacy Training
Most medical professionals and academics receive very little training in policy, advocacy, communications or systems change. This leaves us stuck in an “information-deficit model of change-making,” ie: we will tell them things and they will change their behaviour. This method does not adhere to evidence from the social sciences, and if you’ve given it a try, we suspect you will confirm that it doesn’t work. We have the formal interdisciplinary training and the real-world experience to help you level-up your skills to create impact. Beset be misinformation and non-evidence-based influence–this world needs you!
Bridging Sustainable Healthcare and Community Care
The Association of Faculties of Medicine of Canada has recently endorsed a Roadmap for Planetary Health and Sustainable Health Systems forCanadian Medical Professionals, which calls on healthcare to become more sustainable, and for hospitals to become anchor institutions of sustainability in their community. POWER is supporting conversations between universities, health structures and community organizations as this plan moves into implementation.
