Within Western society the family plays a central role in the health and well-being of individuals across the lifespan. Due to gender norms within many of these societies, women often become positioned as responsible for the caring responsibilities of multiple family members including children, partners, parents and grandparents. Navigating these caring responsibilities can have significant impacts on a caregiver’s overall physical, emotional, social and spiritual health and well-being. These caring experiences are also impacted in unique ways by race, ethnicity, poverty, employment, housing, ability and systemic discrimination.
The devastating impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic have required collective action from community partners more than ever, in order to support the overall health and well-being of caregivers and their family members across multiple generations. Our community-based participatory research (CBPR) program is grounded in the belief that we all have a collective social responsibility to support individual, family and community health. Through this project we hope to continue to explore and understand the experiences of caregivers that are responsible for providing care across multiple generations. Using a participatory approach caregivers will be actively involved in the co-design and co-evaluation of resources and supports for caregivers with a network of community based organizations.
We are looking for other partners that would be interested in working on a similar project within their communities.
Researchers at the Family and Child Health Initiative (FCHI) at The Institute for Better Health (IBH) at Trillium Health Partners (THP) work in partnership with the Family Education Centre (FEC)of Peel and a strong collective of community partners to support caregivers and families in the Peel Region, Ontario, Canada through community-based research, programming and innovation.
