Tom Wolff Delivers at Avenir D’Enfants Conference in Quebec City November 2015

Tom Wolff Delivers | Photo of Tom and grandchildren Jonah and Liora on jumbo screen (story below) Address at Avenir D’Enfants Conference in Quebec City November 2015.

Tom Wolff Delivers Address at Avenir D’Enfants Conference in Quebec City November 2015. Photo of Tom and grandchildren Jonah and Liora on jumbo screen (story below) 

Sustainability Revisited with Avenir D’Enfants in Quebec

In the fall of 2015 I was invited to give a keynote address on sustainability entitled ”Creating a Legacy: Sustaining Your Efforts” and an all day workshop to Avenir D’Enfants . Avenir D’Enfants (The Future of our Children) is a creative 130 site private/public early childhood prevention program).They are in year seven of a ten year cycle of $400 million of private and public funds so the focus was on the issue of sustainability.

Avenir d'enfants  is a partnership meant to help encourage children’s overall development and promote the well-being of families living in the 130 communities throughout Quebec Province. Avenir d’enfants provides guidance and support services to local communities drawing from thousands of organizations who are engaged in the planning, implementation and evaluation of action plans.

Scope of work of Avenir d'enfants:

Avenir d’enfants’ core philosophy is built on a commitment to act in concert with our partners and to promote sustainable practices with regard to early childhood education measures that target children from conception to pre-school age. They are particularly concerned with children and parents living in poverty.

Although they have been working on sustainability all along it was time to commit their annual gathering to this subject. My earlier 2011 Tools for Sustainability http://www.gjcpp.org/en/tool.php?issue=1&tool=2 was the basis for my presentation.

The goals for my work were:

  • Directly address the sustainability challenges facing Avenir d’Enfants over the next 4 years
  • Ask the question – What needs to be sustained?
  • Provide a broader range of options for approaching sustainability so that they can succeed (my four approaches)
  • Remind them that they have four years – this is very doable!

A core piece of my presentation was to describe the Four Approaches to Sustainability:

  1. Institutionalization of changes
  2. Policy change
  3. Community ownership/capacity building
  4. Finding resources to sustain the effort

A core outcome of this training, as with many of my sustainability trainings was that the participants had a chance to spend time focused solely on sustainability. They left the training feeling encouraged because they had more approaches, tools and an actual plan for pursuing sustainability. They were also more willing to tackle the issue and felt  that they could start addressing sustainability right away. Follow up calls have confirmed that they have been able to continue a fcoud on sustainability with their sites.

spring 2016 Issue

  • My recent editorial in the Global Journal of Community Psychology

  • Sustainability Revisited with Avenir D’Enfants in Quebec

  • New Opportunities for Collaborative Solutions with Hospitals and Health Care Systems Emerging from Obama’s Affordable Care Act

  • Key Informant Interviews

  • Connect to Protect

  • New Resources

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