Training and Capacity building

CoPEH-Canada designs training opportunities that bring people together from various backgrounds and multiple ways of knowing. Participants are trained to approach complex problems in ways that address the diverse considerations of ecosystem approaches to health - spanning environmental, social, and cultural influences on health for both humans and ecosystems.

Short courses

A central CoPEH-Canada activity is the collective design and delivery of ecosystem approaches to health summer schools. Since 2008, these courses have convened a diverse group of graduate students and practitioners from different fields for an intensive learning opportunity including case studies, fieldwork and interdisciplinary group work. Since 2012, our summer schools have offered both a career-development workshop, as well as course credit for students taking the full graduate level course. 

Each May we offer a hybrid (on-line and on-site) course at multiple sites. In 2024, courses are being planned in Montreal, Guelph, Burnaby and Prince George. The webinar part of this offer can be followed without attending the onsite components for a certificate. More details can be found here

You can find an example of the short course objectives and schedule here.
 
CoPEH-Canada received a grant from the Burroughs Wellcome Fund to focus the 2024 course on climate and health justice and add a site at SFU/Burnaby with field work on Cortes Island. 
 

TEACHING MANUAL

CoPEH-Canada has designed a teaching guide based on its learning in the design of the intensive course. This initiative has mobilized practitioners, faculty and graduate students across Canada and internationally. The team has developed a flexible modular structure intended for many uses such as short introductory training, two-week intensive courses, workshops, introductory one-day presentations, etc. This online manual continues to be developed with new modules. The manual has been fully translated into French, and an abridged version is available in Spanish.  It is licensed under Creative Commons: Attribution, Non-Commercial, Share Alike and is available for download and dissemination.

CoPEH-Canada has a SSHRC Connection grant to produce new content on participation and equity. 

Personalized Workshops

At CoPEH-Canada we design custom-made workshops and courses, for all levels, sectors and subjects touching on ecosystem approaches to health. We can work with groups interested in ecosystem approaches to health to tailor our teaching materials (see teaching manual for examples) to your needs.

Visit our collaboration page or contact us if you are interested in running a workshop or short course on or using ecosystem approaches to health.

For example, as a part of the project Linking public health, ecosystems and equity through ecohealth training and capacity building, funded by the Public Health Agency of Canada, each node designed and carried out a Career Development Workshop at local Public Health events. Each of these experiences has been drawn up into mini-modules for our teaching manual. These modules were based on the core competencies for Public Health in Canada.

The Québec-Acadie-Atlantique (QAA) Public Health and EcoHealth workshop was held in Québec City during the Journées annuelles de Santé Publique (JASP) in November 2014. The workshop addressed the complexity of working together: an environmental health illustration. The resulting module is titled, Working with partners for a healthy environment.

 

In March of 2014, a workshop at the Ontario Public Health Convention was hosted by EcoHealth Ontario, Forests Ontario, and the Friends of the Greenbelt Foundation. It brought together ninety-six professionals from a variety of sectors to discuss the links among health, well-being, and green space and to explore future opportunities for ecohealth-themed collaborations in this area.

The workshop was titled, “Realizing the Health Benefits of Green Spaces in a Changing World” and a report on the workshop can be found here. The resulting module for the CoPEH Teaching Manual is titled, “Fostering Intersectoral Collaboration.”

The Western Node hosted a pre-conference workshop at the Public Health Association of British Colombia's annual conference in December 2014 about the interface between intersectoral collaboration, ecohealth and core competencies in Public Health.