Summary
Dr. Diana Lewis successful in securing five-year CIHR grant for community-led project centered on environmental health, knowledge mobilization, and capacity building across Turtle Island.
Dr. Diana Lewis has been awarded a 3-million-dollar CIHR grant for the project titled “Building the Autonomy of Indigenous Communities to Make their Data Work for Decision-Making” or BAICM. BAICM builds upon the success of, and relationships strengthened, throughout the CIHR research project, “Developing an Indigenous Value-Based Approach to Environmental Health Risk Assessment” (IEHRA). Our community partners, Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation, Fort Chipewyan Métis Nation, and Mikisew Cree First Nation, and Oneida Nation of the Thames, have worked to create community research advisory committees, develop locally specific environmental health risk assessment models, and implement community-led health surveys to collect baseline health data that reflects local values as well as culture and relationships to land.
The four partner communities are looking to leverage their findings to improve community health outcomes and to support empowered environmental health decision-making – to do so, there is a need to advance each community’s capacity to assert autonomy over their health data and to make evidence-based decisions. Through a community-directed approach, the proposed research addresses community-identified concerns and challenges surrounding 1) data literacy, 2) accessing technical scientific knowledge (Children’s Environmental Health, Wildfires and Groundwater Contaminant Fate and Transport, Microplastics), 3) measuring the economic cost of impacts, and 4) effectively and safely communicating findings to diverse knowledge users.
The summary of this grant can be found on the CIHR website, Building the Autonomy of Indigenous Communities to Make their Data Work for Decision-Making