A gathering of agencies in Nipawin aimed to collect ideas about improving early childhood development.
The Nipawin Early Childhood Development Forum, held April 7, involved organizations like the Kelsey Trail Health Region, North East School Division, KidsFirst, Prince Albert Grand Council, the Town of Nipawin and Rotary. There were 75 in attendance.
“What research shows us and what our Ministry of Health cites,” said Rhonda Teichreb with the health region, is for every $1 invested before the age of three, there’s about a $7 rate of return in terms of health, wellness outcomes for families and individuals across a lifespan. It’s a pretty significant number and it demonstrates to us the need to do better for our children.”
The idea for the forum began when Teichreb made a presentation to the Nipawin Rotary Club around a year ago. Since maternal and child health is one of the worldwide organization’s focuses, working to improve early childhood development was something that interested the club, said its president,Cliff Rose.
“We contacted her after that and said we could be working together to advance that work and fast forward and here we are, having a forum on early childhood development.”
The initial group, which included Rose, Teichreb and Jan Boughen of KidsFirst, then put the call out to other agencies in the area – and they responded.
The event began with six panelists making presentations from a First Nations, health care and education perspective. Then, there were breakout sessions where all of the groups came together.
“This is really the essence of what we are doing, to try to get the insight from the public as to what they see the issues as and then we’ll feed that back into a report,” Rose said, adding he’s hoping that report will be complete by September.
Teichreb said she hoped the forum would be able to identify what was going well or not, and come up with ideas to come up for solutions to fix what wasn’t going well.
