About Youth Excel CLASP

Youth Health Collaborative: Excelerating evidence-informed action

From 2009-2012, Youth Excel was funded by the Canadian Partnership Against Cancer (CPAC) as part of an initiative called CLASP: Coalitions Linking Action and Science for Prevention. The goal of CLASP is to integrate cancer prevention with the prevention of other chronic diseases; to integrate science, policy and practice to optimize prevention efforts; and to catalyze cross-provincial / territorial partnerships to improve individual and population health.

A team of teams

Youth Excel involved policy and program leaders and researchers from 9 provinces and 4 national organizations led by the following host organizations:

NL (Memorial U)
PE (Comprehensive School Health Research Group, U of PEI)
NS (Dalhousie U)
NB (Canadian Cancer Society - New Brunswick Division)
ON (Public Health Ontario)
MB (CancerCare Manitoba, Partners in Planning for Healthy Living)
SK (Saskatchewan Cancer Agency)
AB (U of Alberta, APPLE Schools)
BC (U of Victoria)

The pan-Canadian Joint Consortium for School Health, linking Federal / Provincial / Territorial education & health ministries.

PHE Canada (Physical and Health Education Canada) and the Canadian Association of Principals (CAP).

The Propel Centre for Population Impact, a partnership between the Canadian Cancer Society and the University of Waterloo with a pan-Canadian mandate to build knowledge exchange capacity, which served as secretariat for Youth Excel.

10 Year Vision and Goals

We envision all federal, provincial, and territorial jurisdictions in Canada having capacity to enable leaders in policy, practice, research and evaluation, and youth themselves, to use best available evidence to inform action, and to learn from their actions – all to continuously improve policies and programs that reduce the incidence of tobacco use, poor nutritional habits, and inactivity among youth ages 10-18 years. Two goals will help to achieve this vision:

1. Capacity development goal: To strengthen provincial level knowledge exchange capacity that includes four components a) community monitoring systems to support planning and evaluation of policies and programs for children and youth, b) the ability to use distillations of relevant evidence about the type of intervention most likely to work, c) means for moving evidence into action, and d) means to generate evidence from action.
2. Impact goal: To reduce risk and incidence of chronic diseases among youth through the use of population interventions (policies and programs within and beyond the health sector) that address underlying social, economic, and environmental conditions that give rise to risk behaviours and diseases.

Action Plan

Please see the Youth Excel Logic Model for an overview of our vision, goals and milestones.

Youth Excel has three aims:

Aim 1) Establish and advance priorities for a) moving evidence to action b) deriving evidence from action;

• To do this we will convene a national forum of policy, practice, and research and identify common indicators and measures for physical activity and tobacco use

Aim 2) Accelerate development of knowledge exchange capability in provinces, by doing and sharing case studies to guide this work;

• To do this we will do case studies in 3 provinces and convent a national peer learning forum

Aim 3) Strengthen collaboration among research, policy, practice, and youth leaders by creating mechanisms to enable mutual learning about how to effect efficient and productive knowledge exchange.

• To do this we will convene provincial CLASPS to develop purposeful plans to strengthen relationships, develop exchanges and electronic sharing options

Evaluation is also be a strong component to Youth Excel, to ensure we are continuously learning with and from each other what is working and what needs to be improved.

For more information email: claspATuwaterloo.ca
Please note that email address has been modified to reduce spam

Members only

Link to our members only SharePoint site: sharepoint.uwaterloo.ca/sites/clasp

Youth Excel CLASP was made possible through a financial contribution from Health Canada, through the Canadian Partnership Against Cancer. The views expressed herein represent the views of Youth Excel and do not necessarily represent the views of the project funder.