Child well-being is focus of race for $50M

WATERLOO REGION — The Region of Waterloo is hoping to land a $50-million prize to implement an ambitious community-driven plan to bolster child and youth well-being.

All of the region’s municipalities collaborated and based on extensive public consultation, the region selected healthy children and youth as the focus for its Smart Cities Challenge application to Infrastructure Canada.

“This has really been a huge opportunity for the community to come together and that’s what we’ve done,” said Matthew Chandy, regional manager of economic development and application co-ordinator.

“Everybody wants to find a way to make our community better for children and youth.”

The goal is to become the benchmark community in Canada for child and youth well-being, as the challenge pushed cities to aim high.

“We have to go bigger than we ever thought before,” Chandy said.

The big prize up for grabs is $50 million to implement the plan over 10 years.

The region is first vying for a spot as one of five finalists in the big city category, which comes with it a $250,000 grant to develop a more detailed application for the second phase.

Applications for the first phase closed this week. Finalists in each category will be announced by midsummer. Winners will be announced next spring.

The federal government issued the challenge at the end of November asking municipalities to look at their biggest community challenges and how technology and data could be used to overcome them.

Quickly, the local municipalities gathered together, along with a wide swath of partners including the tech sector.

“It’s a fairly big community initiative,” Chandy said.

UNICEF Canada picked the region to help develop a real-time child and youth well-being dashboard, and that’s part of the application.

After being created and tested locally, the dashboard will be rolled out nationally for communities across Canada to measure child and youth well-being against the UNICEF index.

“We really feel that this is going to give us a leg up in this whole process,” Chandy said of the partnership. “It’s a fantastic relationship for Waterloo Region.”

The region’s plan has six priority areas: Early childhood development, literacy, mental health, bullying, sense of belonging and high school graduation rates.

Central to the plan is a community-based data platform that will connect organizations that support children and youth.

Numerous agencies collect data, but it’s difficult to share that information securely and know how use it to better direct resources and efforts.

“We need to have access to that data and use it for really responding faster to the challenges children and youth are facing,” Chandy said.

He thinks the region’s chances to move on to the next stage are good, considering how the community has come together and the UNICEF partnership.

“I feel really enthusiastic about our chances,” Chandy said.

Regardless, he said, the effort won’t be wasted. The process brought partners and ideas to the table, and work is already underway.