All In For Youth: Evaluating a Collaborative Model of Support for Children, Youth and Families in Inner-City Edmonton Schools

Principal Investigator: Jason Daniels, CUP
Co-investigator: Karen Edwards, CUP
Research Team: Teresa Mejia, Amber Banks, Kirstyn Morley
Primary Funder: United Way of the Alberta Capital Region

The All in For Youth (AIFY) initiative is a school-based, collaborative model of services and programs for children, youth, and families that support the overall wellbeing of students to help them achieve success in their schooling. These collaborative and wraparound supports include student mentoring, mental health supports, family supports, nutrition support, school supports, and out of school care. AIFY is currently running in 5 inner-city schools in Edmonton spanning elementary to high school age children and will carry through this pilot until 2019.

AIFY was developed by a collaborative team including Alberta Education, Boys and Girls Club Big Brothers Big Sisters, City of Edmonton, e4c, Edmonton Catholic School District, Edmonton Public School Board, Edmonton Community Foundation, The Family Centre, Mental Health Foundation, REACH Edmonton, and the United Way of the Alberta Capital Region.

CUP and the Faculty of Extension are supporting the evaluation plan for the AIFY initiative. The aim of the evaluation is to gain valuable insights into the AIFY model of support and ways to build upon the original model. In collaboration with the AIFY operational partners, we have developed a principles-focused approach to the evaluation. The AIFY partners have created a set of core practice principles that represent the initiative and the goal is to determine whether these principles are upheld as the AIFY initiative is implemented in school and evolves over the next three years. The evaluation will capture the perspectives of all stakeholder groups involved (e.g., students, families, teachers, principals, agency staff, agency managers and supervisors, operational partners, community partners) through interviews and focus groups and will use secondary quantitative data from the participating school boards to contextualize and support the qualitative data collected (e.g., school demographic data, school surveys, measures of student resiliency). To date, the information gathered will be used to understand the first year of implementation and the initial impacts of the initiative on the children, youth, and families involved.

Read AIFY's Third Year Evaluation Report here