Youth Engagement Session – “The Power of Coming Together”
March 2022
Mamow Ahyamowen held its first-ever online Youth Engagement Session. This was an opportunity to connect with Youth from across northern Ontario – to hear their voices and to understand the supports they need as well as how they view health and wellbeing in their communities.
Our objectives were to provide an opportunity for participants to:
- Learn about First Nations health data in northern Ontario, with a focus on Mamow Ahyamowen and First Nations data sovereignty (including a few of the key findings from the first analysis the Partnership completed)
- Discover the wide range of employment opportunities related to First Nations health data
- Share priorities regarding health data and research in their communities
With everything going on in today’s world, the fact that we received positive feedback from participants and speakers highlights the power of slowing down and coming together in relation to First Nations health data.
Many priorities voiced by participants aligned with our past and upcoming analyses. This is encouraging because it suggests that our work touches on health concerns that matter to Youth in our communities. Participants also emphasized the direct link between the wellbeing of land, people, and non-human relations in their traditional territories and how working with mainstream health administrative datasets often fails to capture important variables from Indigenous perspectives.
The Youth also reminded us of the importance of (re)centering First Nations understandings of health and wellbeing into the work that we do as a Partnership. This can be challenging when working within health systems informed by Eurocentric worldviews and reinforces the need for co-interpretation of administrative health data with community members.
We were honoured to have Youth participate in the Session and will continue to engage them in the future.
To view the full report, please click here