Community Education Service

The Community Education Service has just finished the first phase of what we hope will be an on-going project to share and develop expertise in large-group education for parents and young people. Through funding from the Provincial Centre of Excellence for Children's Mental Health, we have presented information about the effectiveness of large-group parent education programs to five communities across Ontario, including Kingston, Brockville, Woodstock, Halton, and Windsor. We're presently scheduling additional presentations for April and May.

Several of the communities are now preparing to use our web-based data system to collect information about their workshops, courses, and groups. My colleagues in Hamilton have been our "beta-testers" as we rolled out the new system, and our new Spring 2006 flyer was developed on the new database. Additional features include the selection of your specific community, and selection of a "main focus" for your educational offering. These features will help us construct a better search function, so that parents can find the courses they are looking for more easily.

Other features that you won't see, are the administrative tools to help the person in your community who is pulling together your local flyer. They can now set the dates the database will accept registrations, determine the range of program dates to include in each flyer, and send out a reminder e-mail to everyone in your community.

If your community is looking for funding to offer large-group education, we will soon have a proposal template that you can use to seek funding from organizations or local foundations. It presents the case for why community education is important, and reviews the evidence that it is effective. For a copy of the funding case, e-mail me at the address below.

This list serv is designed to help foster a "community-of-practice". If you have questions about community education, are looking for effective, evidence-based large-group interventions, or want to get some great suggestions on how to increase enrolment in your course, this is the place to post those questions. We have more than 100 participants, whose collective knowledge will be equal to almost any challenge.

Finally, I'd like to thank all those of you who have helped us along this path by suggesting changes and improvements to our web site, by offering high-quality parent courses, and by showing leadership in your agency and community by adopting evidence-based programs that educate and inform our clients.

Don Buchanan
Coordinator, Child & Youth Health Partnership
McMaster Children's Hospital

Evel 1, Chedoke Site
Box 2000, Hamilton, ON L8N 3Z5

'(905) 521-2100, ext. 77061
7(905) 521-7925 fax
/ buchanan@hhsc.ca
http://www.mcmasterchildrenshospital.ca