What We Do

Asokāpāýawih (Resolve):

Since 2012, Well Living House has focused on applied Indigenous knowledge translation. This means getting relevant and useful public health and Indigenous traditional knowledge to health practitioners, program managers and policy-makers. And it means helping them to use this knowledge to improve care and services for Indigenous infants, children and families.

The Well Living House:

1. Works to address the serious deficits in health service, vital statistics, health status, and health surveillance data for Indigenous infants, children and families. This includes:

  • Ongoing partnership work with Indigenous communities and organizations to develop new datasets and linkages;
  • Assessment of the quality and community relevance of existing data sets;
  • Advocacy for higher quality data and data systems;
  • Advocacy for Indigenous governance and management of Indigenous data sets;
  • Using this data to facilitate the planning and evaluation of health services and programs by Indigenous communities and organizations.

2. Identifies and contributes to best practices for improving Indigenous health. This includes drawing from both Indigenous and public health knowledge to:

  • Work with existing funding structures to develop and implement novel community-based methods of program and service evaluation;
  • Develop, implement, and evaluate new pilot programs and/or services;
  • Scale up identified best practices across Indigenous contexts.

3. Works to advance Indigenous Knowledge Translation.

We identify best practices and use innovative methods for gathering and sharing knowledge with community partners (e.g. social networks, Respondent Driven Sampling, concept mapping).

We are also working to build and share an accessible and culturally secure repository of knowledge, to help put traditional knowledge and community-based approaches at the foundation of Indigenous health care.

We serve as a bridge between Indigenous science and knowledge work and western science and knowledge work (e.g. we are developing partnerships that support Indigenous governance and management of Indigenous knowledge and data). These bridging processes draw on cultural values of exchange. We will call on our Elders and work through ceremony as required.

4. Builds research and community capacity.

We will provide training and other forms of capacity building through community-based research methods.

Research topics will include: Culture based parenting, infant and toddler health promotion, neuroplasticity and child development, trauma and recovery, Indigenous midwifery and sexual/reproductive health. Other topics will be determined in time through community consultation.

Research approaches will include: Solutions-based science (e.g. intervention studies, evaluation, integrated knowledge translation, building maternal/child cohorts and databases, establishing a shared knowledge repository).

For more information about what we do, please see projects.