HEY (Healthy Early Years) is a Public Health Agency of Canada program that supports early childhood health promotion programming in official language minority communities across Canada. It provides promotion and prevention activities to help children get off to a better start in life, prepare them for school, and improve opportunities that allow them to grow into healthy adults who participate fully in society. Through HEY, Neighbours develops culturally and linguistically appropriate programs to support families and children aged 0-6.
The Bright Beginnings Program is an adapted approach to supporting English-speaking children and families in Quebec. Providing supportive outreach to vulnerable children and families in our community by collaborating and forming partnerships with French-speaking institutions and organizations, as well as improving existing services for the English-speaking 0-18 population.
Neighbours is able to work towards helping the well-being of children and families through these two programs, and especially help children start off on the right foot, right from the start!
Some examples of how Neighbours strives for these goals are:
We run after-school activities for children ages 4-11 to help with fine and gross motor skills, socialization, and cooperation, through hands-on and interactive games and crafts, and STEM activities.
We give presentations for parents on subjects such as budgeting, healthy eating, and breastfeeding.
We routinely give presentations at the pre-school and elementary grade levels such as learning to talk about emotions and anti-bullying.
At the high school and young adult level, we host talks on subjects such as drugs, anxiety, and sexuality, and we hold an annual short story writing contest for all secondary students in our region.
Neighbours is proud of working closely with our regional English schools by providing these presentations, and supporting families by contributing materials such as School Readiness Kits for new K4 and K5 students and their parents.
A very important part of these programs is our work with local partners to gain access for English-speaking families and children to cultural activities like English guided visits to art galleries and English showings of movies, and also to medical and other community services in English.
