Definitions: Healthy Canadians and Communities Fund

Advanced screening form: First stage of the submission process. You will provide a brief overview of your project and your organization's capacity.

Built environments: Human-made design and layout of the communities in which people live, work and play.

Canadian: Anyone living in Canada, regardless of citizenship or status.

Cultural competency: Practicing cultural safety and sensitivity builds a capacity to work effectively and respectfully within the context of cultural beliefs, behaviours, and needs presented by diverse communities.

Cultural safety: An approach to working across ethnic and other differences. Cultural safety makes systems and organizations responsible for ensuring that project environments are safe for everyone, regardless of their expressed or assumed culture.

Cultural sensitivity: An approach to understanding the cultural contexts and values of populations, which shape their lived experience and/or expertise. These include the social, historical, and political contexts in which populations operate.

Evaluation: Is the systematic assessment of the design, implementation or results of an initiative for the purposes of learning or decision-making.

• Logic model: Is a systematic and visual way to present the perceived relationships among the resources you have to operate the intervention, the activities you plan to do, and the changes or results you hope to achieve.
• Theory of change: A theory of change explains how the activities undertaken by an intervention contribute to a chain of results that lead to the intended or observed impacts. A theory of change is often visually represented using a logic model.
• Experimental design: A type of design that involves splitting participants randomly into treated and control groups. This ensures there is no selection bias.
• Quasi-experimental design: A type of design that involves non-random assignment, but which attempts to replicate many of the benefits of an experimental design.
• Quantitative design: A type of design which relies on examining quantitative data obtained from tools such as closed-ended surveys. This design observes and measures information numerically and employs statistical methods.
• Qualitative design: A type of design which captures the priority population's perceptions, opinions, and experiences about your program activities. It can help with understanding a programmatic aspect in more depth by telling how and what happened, and when and to whom.

Evidence: Research, contextual information and experience that helps to understand the need for an intervention in a priority population, the effectiveness of a particular intervention, or the difference in access to a particular solution. Evidence may refer to systematic reviews, peer-reviewed research, evaluations of pilot projects or policies, practice-based evidence, or culturally-informed ways of knowing such as lived experience of people, families and communities, and cultural and traditional knowledge.

Food environments: The aspects of the physical environment that affect the types of food available, the accessibility of food, and the nutrition information that people receive. All these aspects of the food environment can influence food choices.

Full proposal: Second stage of the submission process, if you are successful in the first stage. You will provide a detailed and more lengthy description of the proposed project.

Health equity: Refers to the absence of unfair systems and policies that cause health inequalities. Health equity seeks to reduce inequalities and to increase access to opportunities and conditions conducive to health for all.

Health inequalities: Refers to differences in health status experienced by different groups in society. Frequently, health inequalities are the consequence of unequal access to societal factors that influence health, referred to as the social determinants of health. For example, income, education, employment and social supports.

Health outcome: Measurable long-term change in an individual or community health status in terms of health-related quality of life, physiological health or mental health and well-being that is attributable to an intervention and assessed using valid and reliable measurement tools.

Healthy foods: Foods that can help develop and maintain a healthy eating pattern.

In-kind contributions: Non-monetary contributions towards your project activities. They are usually in the form of products or services that would normally need to be purchased or acquired for the project. Instead, these in-kind contributions are being provided by other organizations or partners. In-kind contributions may include donated equipment, services or staff time/labour necessary for the proposed project. To be eligible as an in-kind contribution, the contribution must be essential to the project's success and supported by a commitment/letter of support from the contributor. In-kind contributions will only be recognized when fair value can be reasonably estimated.

Intervention: A coordinated set of activities aimed at achieving positive, measurable changes in environments and health behaviours ultimately leading to improved health outcomes. Interventions could include program and/or policy actions that would result in changes to health behaviours.

• Primary prevention intervention: A primary prevention intervention focuses on reducing the behavioural risk factors for chronic disease (physical inactivity, unhealthy eating and tobacco use) to positively impact health.

Knowledge mobilization: A dynamic and iterative process that aims to transform knowledge into action. It helps to capture and share learnings and information on the effectiveness of approaches with others. It includes the synthesis, adaptation, dissemination and exchange of knowledge.

Newcomer: Individuals who came as immigrants and have been in Canada for less than 10 years.

Online portal: The webpage that provides users an entryway to our application forms, processes, FAQs and more.

Physical environments: Neighbourhood spaces (built environments, food environments) that remove barriers and make it easier for people to engage in healthy behaviours.

Priority populations: Groups in Canada that face health inequalities and are at greater risk of chronic disease. Priority populations are identified based on research and evidence that is reviewed, compiled and verified by experts in the fields of health equity and chronic disease prevention. Our identified priority populations for this solicitation are:

• Indigenous Peoples
• newcomers to Canada
• people with disabilities
• 2SLGBTQIA+ communities
• people living on low income
• racialized communities (such as Black and South Asian)

Pro-smoking environments: Social environments that negatively influence tobacco prevention and cessation.

Project phases: Refers to the phase of maturity of a project. We acknowledge the importance of supporting projects at various stages.

• Design: Initial design of an intervention with a priority population and development of multi-sectoral partnerships.
• Implement: Project delivery with partners and evaluation of the intervention.
• Scale: Expand an intervention that has been evaluated and shown to work in order to impact greater numbers, alter cultural norms, and change policies.

Pure research: An original investigation undertaken to gain new scientific or technical knowledge and understanding, but without specific applications.

Rural and remote communities:

• Rural community: Population under 1,000.
• Remote community: A remote community is a geographic area that is located over 350 km from the nearest service centre having year-round road access. Residents in these areas have greater difficulty in accessing key health, economic and social resources.

Small organization: Have less than 10 employees and an annual organizational budget of less than $500,000.

Social environments: Social settings for people to engage in healthy behaviours. For example, support from family, friends, colleagues/peers and professionals; increasing social cohesion, participation, community belongingness, social support; and/or reducing social isolation and loneliness.

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