Ottawa – The Intersectoral Action Fund (ISAF) is the first Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) program explicitly dedicated to support collective action across sectors on the social determinants of health to reduce health inequities. This grant program seeks to strengthen capacity and build knowledge and tools to enable partners to work together across sectors to advance action on the social determinants of health. The program prioritizes funding upstream projects, or projects that are addressing the root causes of ill health and health inequities.
Following the 2021 ISAF Call for Proposals, 27 projects were funded in communities across Canada in 2021-2022 and 2022-2023. A renewal of ISAF through Budget 2023 enabled the program to fund an additional 16 projects from the 2021 solicitation, representing over $3.2 million in funding.
Funded projects address a wide variety of social determinants of health impacting communities across Canada, including homelessness, pay inequities, racism, and also prioritized projects led-by and serving equity deserving populations, including Indigenous, Black, and other racialized communities, 2SLGBTQIA+ communities, women, and older persons.
The 16 additional projects that received funding are:
Lead organization: Canadian Centre for Housing Rights
Project name: Advancing the right to housing for individuals released from health-care facilities
Location: Toronto, Ontario
Funding: $248,950
Description: This project aims to address the pressing issue of homelessness risk associated with individuals staying in and being discharged from health-care institutions in Canada. This will be done through investigating the scope of the present issue, its impact on different equity-seeking groups (including seniors and people with addictions and mental health challenges, who it is suspected may be most impacted) and by formulating effective strategies to support individuals whose housing is at risk during extended healthcare stays or upon discharge into precarious housing situations or homelessness.
Lead organization: Canadian Mental Health Association, Metropolitan Toronto Branch
Project name: Toronto supportive housing growth plan: Advancing intersectoral action on harm reduction and anti-racism
Location: Toronto, Ontario
Funding: $195,148
Description: This project will drive progress in the implementation of two priorities of the Toronto Supportive Housing Growth Plan: harm reduction and anti-racism. It will strengthen and formalize partnerships between municipal partners, community organizations, housing providers and health providers to co-design improvements to advance health equity by:
- enhancing access to harm reduction services in housing settings and streamlining the integration of leadership from organizations that are led by and serve racialized communities and people with lived experienced.
- expanding the capacity of multiple sectors to establish and grow a network of community partners to address urgent needs of people experiencing homelessness in the City of Toronto.
Lead organization: Centre for Innovation and Research in Aging Inc.
Project name: Development, implementation, and evaluation of a bilingual rights-based data repository: An educational intervention to improve knowledge about the human rights of older adults
Location: Fredericton, New Brunswick
Funding: $249,622
Description: This project seeks to develop an interactive web-based tool offering up-to-date, de-identified, and customizable data on Older Persons Human Rights. The project aims to develop, implement and evaluate a web-based Older Person’s Human Rights Indicator Framework (OPRIF) data repository in both of Canada’s official languages and to establish the feasibility and acceptability of an online framework. This will be based on the Child Rights Indicators Framework (CRIF), which was implemented a few years ago as a static online report. The two web-based CRIF and OPRIF data repositories will support the Government of New Brunswick, and other provinces, to uphold the human rights of children and older persons, respectively, in their development, implementation, and evaluation of policies, programs, and practices.
Lead organization: Community-Based Research Centre Society
Project name: Establishing the Canadian coalition to abolish conversion therapy
Location: Burnaby, British Columbia
Funding: $250,000
Description: The Canadian Coalition to Abolish Conversion Therapy will connect 2SLGBTQIA+ community organizations (including those serving Indigenous people, Black and People of Colour and newcomers), with academics, researchers, legal experts, survivors, and key stakeholders from mental health organizations and affirming faith organizations.Collaborative knowledge sharing and coalition development are necessary to support broader prevention efforts. By working together, they aim strengthen equality for 2SLGBTQIA+ people; and help people who have been exposed, or may be at risk of exposure, to conversion practices, centre themselves.
Lead organization: Council of Agencies Serving South Asians
Project name: Racialized health initiative: Addressing health disparities in racialized communities in Ontario
Location: Toronto, Ontario
Funding: $248,282
Description: This project seeks to create system-level changes in health care in Ontario by addressing health disparities in racialized communities. The project seeks to further develop work by the Racialized Health Working Group to develop population specific health and wellbeing strategies, create community awareness for the need for disaggregated race-based data collection, and gain community input on strategies and data standards.
Lead organization: Déclic, Initiatives pour la formation et l’emploi des jeunes
Project name: Développement d’un protocole d’intervention intersectoriel au soutien de la transition à la vie adulte des ex-placés de la protection de la jeunesse
Location: Montreal, Quebec
Funding: $239,865
Description: This project seeks to develop an intersectoral action protocol for former children and youth in care of Quebec’s Director of Youth Protection. This vulnerable population faces major challenges in terms of health, education and social and professional integration. This protocol will focus on the social determinants of health and wellbeing and facilitate collaboration between players who traditionally operate independently (in “silos”).
Lead organization: HIV Legal Network
Project name: It’s not so “simple”: Assessing the impact of the simple drug possession and trafficking offences on health equity
Location: Toronto, Ontario
Funding: $92,671
Description: This project seeks to gather information through a comprehensive review of literature and primary interviews on the distinction made between drug possession for personal use versus for the purpose of trafficking. Additionally, it explores how people acquire, keep, carry, and consume criminalized substances for personal use. The project will also look at the immediate and longer-term impacts of the prohibition of simple drug possession and trafficking on the health and well-being of people who use drugs. The findings will assist policymakers to make more informed decisions that improve the justice system’s response to personal drug use and trafficking, with potential beneficial outcomes that include reduced harms to the health and wellbeing of people who use drugs.
Lead organization: Mino Care
Project name: Black Canadian perinatal health network: A Canadian African, Caribbean, and Black (ACB) reproductive and perinatal health research and policy initiative
Location: Toronto, Ontario
Funding: $195,147
Description: This project proposes a national study and policy initiative that addresses the Black maternal health experience that Black birthing persons have had over the past decade in Canada through a survey and focus groups. This knowledge will then be used to begin policy-based initiatives that will encourage the Canadian government to acknowledge the Black maternal health experience and make care more equitable, culturally safe and reduce morbidities and mortalities.
Lead organization: National Collaborating Centre of Determinants of Health (via St. Francis Xavier University)
Project name: Becoming an intersectoral network-of-networks: Leveraging the Health Promotion Canada platform to create an intersectoral and interdisciplinary space for promoting collaborative action on the social determinants of health and wellbeing
Location: Antigonish, Nova Scotia
Funding: $171,088
Description: This project seeks to support an intersectoral network-of-networks, through a virtual space uniquely designed to undertake collaborative action on the social determinants of health at the national level. This does not currently exist in Canada and has been identified as a need by health promotion and public health practitioners, including both the National Collaborating Centre of Determinants of Health and Health Promotion Canada.
Lead organization: New Brunswick Coalition for Pay Equity Inc.
Project name: Building Indigenous partnerships for pay equity
Location: Moncton, New Brunswick
Funding: $168,913
Description: This project will partner with the New Brunswick Committee for the Advancement of Aboriginal Women (CAAW) to build capacity to advance intersectoral action on New Brunswick Indigenous women’s income and pay equity in New Brunswick First Nations communities, in collaboration with First Nation communities and Indigenous organizations. The New Brunswick Coalition for Pay Equity and CAAW will identify and meet key Indigenous organizations, share their knowledge of pay equity and invite them to propose representatives to join an advisory committee to co-develop research and make recommendations on pay equity in the context of NB First Nations communities.
Lead organization: Sexual Assault Services of Saskatchewan (SASS) Inc.
Project name: Building an intersectoral primary prevention workforce to advance gender transformative approaches to sexual violence prevention in Saskatchewan
Location: Regina, Saskatchewan
Funding: $249,465
Description: This project seeks to build capacity for a diverse team of policy and practise stakeholders who are committed to intersectoral action in leading and testing new primary prevention efforts to end sexual violence. In partnership with Shift: The Project to End Domestic Violence at the University of Calgary, SASS will develop an understanding of root causes and drivers of sexual violence for Saskatchewan’s unique context; identify the multi-sectoral policy structures that inform strategic priority setting in Saskatchewan; and develop internal processes and tools to support intersectoral action on sexual violence prevention.
Lead organization: Smart Prosperity Institute (via University of Ottawa)
Project name: Strengthening the core: Increasing social license for healthy infill development in London, Ontario
Location: Ottawa, Ontario
Funding: $174,384
Description: This project seeks to identify and co-develop policy solutions, with the London community, to encourage greater social license for building “healthy infill” housing in urban cores that improves community health outcomes, quality of life, and housing affordability.
Lead organization: Sport Tourism Canada
Project name: Project SEEIM: Sports Socio-Environmental-Economic Impact Model
Location: Kingston, Ontario
Funding: $242,100
Description: This project seeks to build a free and universally accessible online tool that will function as an accountability system for sport activity planning. It will allow for an accurate assessment of not only financial impacts but also indirect and induced social, economic, health and environmental impacts, separately and collectively. This will allow for the calculation of the total impacts associated with the activity, which will inform decision-making.
Lead organization: The Alberta First Nations Information Governance Centre
Project name: Building capacity across health and education boundaries for action on social determinants of health and wellbeing in First Nations communities
Location: Tsuu T’ina First Nation, Alberta
Funding: $209,904
Description: This project seeks to determine cross-cutting issues in health and education with the greatest potential to address overall wellness in Alberta First Nations communities. By engaging sectors and experts of First Nations health and education, the project intends to gather and synthesize information, both through an examination of research literature and engagement of program staff, as well as community members/Elders, on cross-cutting issues that may then be used as a ‘source of truth’ in the development of a set of ‘Consensus Statements’.
Lead organization: Women’s College Hospital
Project name: Scaling up equity-mobilizing partnerships in community (EMPaCT) to facilitate intersectoral action on the social determinants of health
Location: Toronto, Ontario
Funding: $192,596
Description: This project seeks to directly scale the adoption of EMPaCT, an award-winning, scalable model of diverse citizen engagement, at Trillium Health Partners (THP) to foster transformative partnerships capable of co-creating knowledge and policy solutions to advance health equity in Mississauga. Specifically, the project will co-design, co-initiate and co-develop a jurisdictionally-based EMPaCT at THP. This will directly generate transferable knowledge about how EMPaCT can be implemented across organizations and communities, break down institutional silos, and build capacity to mobilize knowledge between jurisdictions for greater collective impact through advocacy and upstream policy influence.
Lead organization: York Region Food Network
Project name: Social procurement collaborative for York region
Location: Aurora, Ontario
Funding: $109,571
Description: This project seeks to develop the necessary infrastructure for social procurement to flourish in York Region, by improving access to fair employment and decent work. This will be done by connecting the dots between the policy (regional) and practice of social procurement on the ground by curating the tools, processes and relationships to make these opportunities accessible to communities.