Before sending the Application for Phase 3, we wanted to know about our partners’ willingness to continue their partnership until 2018 considering that the Teams would have to work with an important decrease in yearly funds and that some criteria might increase the weight of our Application:
- Show intention to scale up
- School-based intervention
From SURVEY 1 (researchers), we concluded that most partners were interested in continuing their partnership despite budget reduction and that three reasons were brought up by our partners that prevented us to viewed a school-based intervention as an ideal approach for reaching participants in First Nation communities: 1) there is continuing mistrust of schools as institutions and as physical spaces in some communities as a result of the legacy of residential schools; 2) some communities are currently experiencing cutbacks in school resources making further demands on staff and resources difficult to meet; and 3) feedback from Phase 2 of our project indicates that an important aspect of the intervention is its positive impact on parents; ensuring parents’ participation demands a flexibility in timing and location of the family aspect of the intervention.
For all these reasons and also due to the need for a strong structural component in order to set favourable conditions to scale-up, we proposed an intervention that is Health Center-based.
From SURVEY 2 (community partners), we concluded that all the community members who had answered the survey were interested in pursuing their engagement into Phase 3 and that they were opened to the idea of integrating the program into schools; they gave us some contact information. Some of them even provided ideas to reach new sponsors.
From SURVEY 3 (regional Centres), we concluded that despite a relatively low budget, representatives were interested in delivering the program in their region. Mrs. Copenace from the Kenora Chiefs Advisory and Mr. Garry Munro from the Cree Nation Tribal Health Centre had received initial documents explaining Phase 3 and a draft budget; both of them were reached over the phone to give them the opportunity to ask questions and both of them have sent a Contribution Letter that indicates their capacity to accomplish numerous related tasks.
From SURVEY 4 (community partners), we concluded that the projected amount to pay facilitators (from our minimum cost delivery budget) would be acceptable to them, although some of them would have preferred a more substantial amount.
