Making Change with Community Action
The MDI offers opportunities for engaging others and creating the context for shared responsibility for children’s health and well-being. Explore the numerous ways MDI data can be used to support partnerships and collaborations aimed toward broader community change.
Supporting Collaborative Action
Children’s well-being is not the responsibility of any individual institution or organization, it is a collective responsibility. MDI data can be a powerful tool to bring together schools, community organizations, government, health authorities, and other key stakeholders around a common cause and to catalyze action. By working collectively, we can build partnerships, share responsibility, leverage resources and coordinate change efforts.
MDI Community Story - City of Surrey
Hear from Daljit Gill-Badeesha, former Manager of Healthy Communities with the City of Surrey, who describes the role of the MDI in bringing together multiple stakeholders across one of BC’s largest municipalities, including children, to conceptualize and create an after-school kids program in the municipality.
Watch Video Building a Common Language of Well-being in Schools
Hear from Mike Hooker, Superintendent in Revelstoke, BC, who has been using the MDI since 2014 to engage a range of community stakeholders, including children, to create a common language for discussing and addressing critical issues relating to social and emotional well-being in their community.
Watch Video “The MDI has sparked generative conversations, built bridges between community partners and helped to focus efforts towards action that makes a difference and can be measured. We have seen first-hand how groups that use the MDI begin to better understand their community.”
Guidelines for Understanding & Using MDI School District Data
Listen to Greg Smyth, Superintendent of Pacific Rim School District (BC), discuss how the team has used MDI data to convene numerous partners from across the community to discuss the well-being of children in their community and engage in long-term planning.
Watch Video Spark Dialogue & Develop Solutions
The active process of learning, making meaning, and action planning can uncover opportunities for making change in the practices of anyone who works with and for children, both inside and outside of schools. Taking the time to dig into the data with staff and/or partners can identify ways that the well-being of children is already being supported in your schools and communities, but also opportunities to go farther and amplify efforts.
Inform & Monitor Programs & Plans
MDI data provide a rich source of information on the well-being of children and the assets in their lives. By examining MDI data, collaborative teams can identify both areas of strength and of challenge—information which can inform community planning. For communities where MDI data are collected at regular intervals (for example, every year, or every two years), MDI data can be used to monitor progress towards these goals as part of a continuous quality improvement process.
MDI Data Helping School District Improve Connectedness
Hear from Roberta O’Brien, former coordinator of the Middle Childhood Matters Table in Maple Ridge-Pitt Meadows, describing a partnership between the municipality (School District 42 and the Parks and Recreation Department) to develop a school-based and city-implemented, lunchtime program to promote social, emotional and physical well-being.
Watch Video The MDI Supports Collaboration
Hear from Peter Dubinsky, former Director of Instruction in Burnaby, BC, describe how MDI data was used to build connections between schools and after-school service providers to strengthen and improve opportunities for after-school programming for children in the district. As a result, there has been an increase equitable access and distribution of related programs across the community.
Watch Video Support Efforts to Increase Equity
MDI data can support efforts to increase equity for children in your schools and community. The neighborhood maps, which are included in the BC MDI School District and Community reports, provide a visual representation of how the assets present in children’s lives are distributed throughout neighbourhoods in your community. These maps, and the accompanying reports for each neighbourhood, can help illuminate inequities present in your community and provide a starting point for work to improve equity.
Interested in how you can make change within the school system?
Making Change Workshops
To support you in exploring the data and developing solutions with staff and partners, our team has designed a two-part, step-by-step workshop. You can follow as is, or adapt as needed.
