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Building Connections for Valley Families Project

Project Overview

The Building Connections for Valley Families Project (Connections Project) is founded on the belief that we can work together as a community to increase children’s health in the early years in the Comox Valley. UBC’s Human Early Learning Partnership has been collecting early childhood development data across communities in BC for over 20 years; using HELP’s Early Development Instrument (EDI) data as a starting point, the CVEYC made a commitment to strive to reduce early childhood vulnerability and increase early years well-being for all children in our community. We aim to identify and build on the strengths of this community in how it supports and encourages young children to thrive and develop physically, socially, emotionally, and cognitively. 

As a result of thorough community and parent engagement, we hope to support families with young children in finding play and learning opportunities and in building social connections in their neighbourhoods.

In the Building Connections Project, we aim to

What is the Early Development Instrument (EDI)?

The Human Early Learning Partnership (HELP) at the University of British Columbia has been measuring the trends and patterns in the development of kindergarten-aged children in British Columbia for more than 20 years. Through their research, HELP examines how various environments, experiences, contexts and systems influence child development in communities across BC.

Their Early Development Instrument (EDI) has been used across BC to measure the developmental health of kindergarten children, and includes five scales that measure; physical health & wellbeing, social competence, emotional maturity, language & cognitive development, and communication skills & general knowledge. EDI data serve as a reflection of the quality of environments children are exposed to in their earliest years of development.

Kindergarten teachers complete these questionnaires in February for the children in their classroom, and every three years data are combined and compiled into “waves” of data in each school district/neighbourhood. EDI data have been collected in seven waves over two decades, allowing researchers, policy-makers, service providers, and parents to identify how child development characteristics are changing across the province. 

Using EDI Data to spark Neighbourhood-level change

In 2018, the Comox Valley Early Years Collaborative reviewed a recent wave of EDI data (Wave 6, 2013-2016) for the Comox Valley area. At that time, trends across the province showed that the majority of kindergarten-aged children in BC (over 67%) were doing very well in terms of early childhood development outcomes. In the Comox Valley, we saw similar trends, in that the majority of the children growing up in this community (60%) were meeting or exceeding child development outcomes.

The CVEYC saw great potential for this number to increase, so that more children in our community experience improved wellbeing in their earliest and most important years of development. These data gave us an opportunity to step back and identify how families with young children are being supported and are accessing resources in the Comox Valley, and how service providers and professionals can better connect with families, in order to improve early childhood outcomes. In 2019, the CVEYC launched a community-driven project to connect and engage with members of the Comox Valley community in order to improve early childhood outcomes – which we call the Building Connections for Valley Families Project.

 The Building Connections Project Approach

The Building Connections for Valley Families Project uses a social innovation lab approach. Social innovation labs are an approach to tackling complex societal challenges that require systems thinking and systems change. Reducing childhood vulnerability is just such a complex challenge. Social innovation labs provide a structured process for approaching complex challenges, and a safe and creative environment to try neighbourhood-level innovations. It also enables deep collaboration among multi-disciplinary teams and diverse stakeholders, and takes a user-centred approach as opposed to institution- or organization-centred approaches. The focus is and always will be on the families who live in these communities. 

The Social Innovation Lab Process

What is Systems Thinking?

We often think of a system as an organization, but simply put, a system is any group of things that interact towards a common goal.  The goal may not be explicit to all.

Understanding and ultimately changing the system that supports child development for the better firstly requires us to take a step back, heighten our awareness and suspend our assumptions and beliefs.  It requires us to take a whole new look at what contributes to children’s development in our community.

Families, child care centres, schools, community organizations, political influences, and social & economic conditions are just a few of the many factors that interact and contribute to the system that supports healthy child development.

A systems thinking approach is therefore critical in recognizing that sustainable systemic change requires work at multiple levels if parents and their children are to receive a deeply anchored web of support.

Conventional Thinking Vs. Systems Thinking

Why use a neighbourhood approach?

In the Building Connections Project, we have organized the project around the four EDI neighbourhoods determined by the Human Early Learning Partnership. We use a ‘neighbourhood’ approach to increase supports and build connectedness for families in the communities or neighbourhoods in which they live. The neighbourhood approach ensures any community innovations are tied to a specific area and led by parents living there.  This also allows us to align our findings with subsequent EDI results and to easily access other research data that HELP also gathers for these geographies. 

The four Comox Valley neighbourhoods are:

• North Comox Valley (includes Dove Creek, Merville, Black Creek, Airport area)

• South Comox Valley (includes Royston, Union Bay, Fanny Bay, Denman & Hornby Islands, Cumberland)

• West Courtenay

• Comox-Valley View

For the purpose of the Building Connections project, we have further divided the regions to respond appropriately to the vastly different experiences of parents in each area.

Where are we now?

Since 2019, we have worked collaboratively with parents, service providers, early years professionals, and community members in several neighbourhoods in the Comox Valley.  We began our efforts in the more rural neighbourhoods in the Valley (North and South Comox Valley), where connections and supports for parents are more limited, and are moving now to the more centralized neighbourhoods as the project progresses.

Contact the Project Coordinator

For more information about the Building Connections Project or to learn how you can participate, please contact Joanne Shroeder, joanne.schroeder@ubc.ca

Key Building Connections Project Funders

The Building Connections for Valley Families Project is made possible with generous support from: