BREAKING NEWS. Outdoor Play Canada, the Healthy Active Living and Obesity Research Group at the CHEO Research Institute, Andrew Fleck Children's Services and Algonquin College have recently been awarded $2M for a 5-year project to launch the Canadian Centre for Outdoor Play, a centre of excellence where practice, policy and research will come together to...
Thank you to Gerben Helleman, author of the blog Urban Springtime and Researcher Public Space and Child-friendly Cities at The Hague University of Applied Sciences, for providing this post. Fortunately, more and more municipalities are working on play-friendly public spaces. However, many policy visions and investments are still based on assumptions made by municipal officials or...
Thank you to ParticipACTION for providing this post. The 2022 ParticipACTION Children and Youth Report Card has arrived! The 15th edition of the Report Card contains grades based on data collected during the pandemic to better assess its impact on kids’ movement behaviours. The pandemic drove a sudden and drastic shift in how kids could access physical...
Save the date! The 2023 Breath of Fresh Air Summit will be held from September 27-29th, 2023 in Wesley Clover Parks, Ottawa, ON! Just one year away! Led by Outdoor Play Canada, Breath of Fresh Air is a two-day Outdoor Play Summit where thought leaders, practitioners, researchers, and policy makers can connect and share best practices. The...
Thank you to Rachel Ramsden, PhD student at the School of Population and Public Health, University of British Columbia, for providing this post. Summer weather encourages many of us outdoors and, as we saw during the COVID pandemic, being outside brings us many benefits – to our health and wellbeing. The research in our lab focuses...
Thank you for Dr. Hilary Caldwell, Dr. Sara Kirk, Mike Arthus and Dr. Camille Hancock Friesen from the Healthy Populations Institute, Dalhousie University, for providing this post. This blog post was originally published in SaltWire. Nova Scotia is Canada’s Ocean Playground. Our ocean playground is one of the many reasons Nova Scotians, and Canadians, love this coastal...
UPDATE: The Breath of Fresh Air Summit 2023 is SOLD OUT! The Breath of Fresh Air Summit 2023 will run from September 27-29, 2023 at the Ottawa Forest and Nature School and Wesley Clover Parks Campground in Ottawa ON! This two-day Outdoor Play Summit will bring together thought leaders, practitioners, researchers, and policy makers to connect and...
The Parks Accessibility Conference runs virtually from August 23-25, 2022 and is free to attend! Led by Engineering Health at the KITE (Knowledge Innovation Talent Everywhere) Research Institute, the conference will bring together those with a desire to improve accessibility at national parks in Canada. Conference themes surround three main questions: What does National Park accessibility...
May 24th, 2022 1-2:15pm ET The 17th UNICEF Report Card on Child and Youth Well-being will be launched with a focus this year on children's environment. For the past two decades the UNICEF Report Cards have examined the state of children and youth's wellbeing across high-income countries providing comparisons and rankings for each country based...
Thank you to Sylvie Melsbach, partnerships and outdoor play lead at the Regroupement des centres de la petite enfance de la Monteregie, for providing this post. The "Poupons et trottineurs ouverts vers le monde extérieur : Creating Optimal Outdoor Spaces for Infants and Toddlers in Early Learning and Child Care" project is based on the premise that...
