Spring 2025 Implementing Healthy Urban Policy Workshop

At its most fundamental level, healthy cities research depends on partnerships between researchers, municipalities, and community organizations to identify needs and co-design projects to help address those needs. To support collaboration between city leaders and researchers, the CIHR Healthy Cities Research Initiative (HCRI) will soon launch a funding opportunity focused on implementing healthy urban policy.

The fourth iteration of these grants, funding will support the co-development of activities related to implementing and evaluating interventions in urban settings to improve health and wellbeing.

A unique aspect of this funding call is the opportunity to participate in a five-day immersive workshop with teams composed of four city/community leaders and one researcher. The workshops are organized by 8 80 Cities, an innovative organization with the mission to ignite action and challenge the status quo to create healthier, more equitable, and sustainable cities for all people.

The workshop will take place In May / June 2025 in Helsinki, Finland. Teams will benefit from examining how this model city has designed, implemented and evaluated healthy urban policies such as:

  • Housing and sustainable growth
  • Healthy and active public spaces for all seasons
  • Planning the equitable city for all ages

Teams will draw on these learnings to develop action plans and intervention research ideas for their own Canadian cities. The required workshop will explore the connection between improved health outcomes and well-designed, maintained, and programmed infrastructures and interventions, and will emphasize opportunities for using data and research.

The specific objectives of this funding opportunity are to:

  • Empower and support communities and researchers to collaboratively adapt, implement and evaluate healthy cities interventions with the ultimate goals of maximizing the success, long-term sustainability, health, and equity-promoting potential of interventions; and
  • Build capacity among knowledge users and implementers to continually monitor and improve urban environments to meet the needs of people of all ages, abilities, cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds.

Subscribe to the HCRI mailing list to be the first to know when this opportunity launches through an upcoming ICS Planning and Dissemination Grants competition this Spring!

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