$9.9 million donation to the Owerko Centre to improve child mental health care and provide opportunities for students
By Freeha Anjum, September 3 2024—
There is an increasing number of mental health patients each year, and 70 per cent of mental health problems arise in childhood or adolescence. At the University of Calgary, the Alberta Children’s Hospital Foundation (ACHF) is working to address this with a donation of 9.9 million dollars to the Owerko Centre.
As a research centre within the Alberta Children’s Hospital Research Institute, the Owerko Centre is a multidisciplinary research hub, focusing on child neurodevelopment and mental health, and spanning faculties across campus. Dr. Susan Graham — director of the Owerko Centre, scientific director for the Azrieli Accelerator and a professor in the Department of Psychology at U of C — spoke more about the Owerko Centre with the Gauntlet.
“All of our researchers are focused on examining child neurodevelopment and child mental health. However, we cover a very broad spectrum of research within this. There are projects ranging from research looking at fundamental neuroscience questions to public policy-level questions” Graham explained.
Helen Dunlop — senior specialist, Marketing, Communications and Events at the Owerko Centre and Azrieli Accelerator — describes how far-reaching the benefits will be on campus.
“It covers almost every faculty at UCalgary, and this is seen in our trainees as well. We are exploring all kinds of research areas,” added Dunlop.
Funding to the Owerko Centre from the ACHF is from donors in Calgary and surrounding areas. This allows for more flexibility in the usage of these funds towards initiatives that are most important to improving child mental health.
“The funding comes from our generous community,” Graham said. “And philanthropy — that is, funding that’s from donations — can be used to launch programs and projects that more traditional funding sources can’t do.”
The Owerko Centre divides its initiatives into three core components — research, community engagement and training/education.
Within research, projects pivotal to both creating services and understanding child development are being funded. Graham identified the main gap in the child mental health system and how the Owerko Centre works to combat it.
“The gap in the child mental health system is access. Access to services and particularly evidence-based services” she explained, a sentiment also shared by The Centre for Addiction and Mental Health.
Many researchers associated with the Owerko Centre are embedded in The Summit: Marian & Jim Sinneave Centre for Youth Resilience — focused on providing and developing evidence-based services by evaluating their outcomes on children’s mental health.
“We test out evidence-based approaches and try to understand what the risk factors and protective factors are, and what does the trajectory of child and youth mental health look like for individuals?” said Graham.
Graham further explained that the first studies to be supported by the new funds to the Owerko Centre will be to their three longitudinal pregnancy cohort studies to evaluate parental well being as well as child development prenatally and in early life.
Within community engagement, the Owerko Centre works through the Little Red Reading House in Inglewood for knowledge mobilisation and community-based research.
“We want to get research knowledge from the lab and the University into the hands of the people who need to use it […] and we want to know what questions the communities have that they would like answered,” Graham explained.
The first usage of the funds within this component was to hire a manager for research and partnerships based in the Little Red Reading house, who works with community agencies — such as The Food Bank and Big Brothers Big Sisters — to evaluate their programming.
Lastly, the Owerko Centre puts resources towards education by providing opportunities for students to learn and grow. This includes access to fully funded research labs, allowing student projects to have the extra support needed to run smoothly. The Little Red Reading House also offers opportunities for students at the Werklund School of Education to do their practicum, and students at the School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape to partake in a planning course.
“Having opportunities to see the full research process, from the really mundane parts of coding and analysing data, to seeing outcomes, to communicating the results of research, is a skillset that translates to many different areas of life,” said Graham. “[The funding] presents a great opportunity for students to have involvement in research as well as community-based activities.”
The first usages of the new ACHF funds within the education component have gone towards funding eight graduate student scholarships for students who have taken a less traditional path to graduate school or faced unique circumstances.
“We’re really excited about the winners,” said Graham.
With the new funding at the Owerko Centre focused on such a wide range of initiatives within child mental health and neurodevelopment, Dunlop and Graham are hopeful about the impact the funding will have.
“Owerko has so many really powerful connections across campus and is at the centre of this great thriving ecosystem of child health research,” Dunlop concluded.
Learn more about the Owerko Centre here.