Healthy Early Years program
The Healthy Early Years (HEY) program is led by the Public Health Agency of Canda (PHAC). It was launched in 2019 after consultations with OLMC stakeholders across Canada and is part of the Government of Canada's Action Plan for Official Languages.
HEY funds projects that improve the healthy development of children (birth to 6 years) and their families living in official language minority communities (OLMC) facing conditions of risk, such as:
- Poverty
- Teen pregnancy
- Social and geographic isolation
- Substance use
- Family violence
- Limited education;
- Indigenous population;
- Lack of existing early childhood health promotion services available in the minority language; and/or
- Recent immigrants or refugees;.
On this page
Program objective
The HEY program's goal is to improve the health and development of OLMC children and their families. HEY works towards this goal by funding health and development programs that are appropriate to the culture and language of the OLMC community.
These programs aim to improve:
- access to health promotion activities
- access to knowledge and resources
- capacity building and training initiatives
HEY projects adapt their activities to meet the needs of the people they serve. Their initiatives may include a variety of public health topics, including:
- infant and child health and development
- postnatal and parental health
- mental health
- nutrition and healthy weights
- injury prevention
Funding
PHAC provides 1.89 million annually to support the HEY program's initiatives. HEY distributes these funds to community-level organizations and projects that:
- have ongoing engagement with regional and local networks
- are based on the development of community plans
There are currently 2 HEY funding recipients:
- Société Santé en français (SSF)
- oversees funding to improve the health and early development of children living in minority francophone OLMCs across Canada (outside of Quebec)
- Community Health and Social Services Network (CHSSN)
- oversees funding to improve the health and early development of children living in minority anglophone OLMCs in Quebec
Together, the SSF and the CHSSN support about 59 projects each year. These projects serve approximately 22,000 children, parents, caregivers, pregnant women and people in OLMCs.