Background: Social and Economic Inclusion Initiative (SEII)

In 2002, the SPNO partnered with the Population and Public Health Branch (PPHB) of Health Canada - Ontario and Nunavut Region (now the Public Health Agency of Canada) to implement the PPHB's Goal:

To demonstrate how communities can mobilize and develop healthy public policies and practices that foster social and economic inclusion, and thereby, improve the conditions needed for good health.

Between October 2002 and March 2004, the SPNO worked with social planning councils and community leadership in the following five areas across the province to initiate the development of community mobilization strategies around issues of local/regional concern related to population health:

• Kingston working with the homeless population
• Peel-Halton working with newcomers seeking health and social services
• Central West Ontario (Kitchener-Waterloo, Cambridge, Brant County) working with youth and seniors in rural and urban communities
• Sudbury working with Aboriginal and Francophone children and families
• Thunder Bay working with isolated youth

The local social planning councils in each of these regions worked with community leadership to mobilize dialogue and action on priority local concerns on population health issues.

An SPNO Resource Team provided central strategic and technical support to the five local projects, including documenting and analyzing their experiences in a series of critical case studies.

Late in 2004, four of the local projects applied for and received one-year funding renewal from the Public Health Agency of Canada - Ontario Region (formerly PPHB). The SPNO Central Resource Team was also re-funded to provide continuing support to project development.