This project will engage individuals, communities and organizations across Alberta in order to identify the needs, priorities, and goals of vulnerable perinatal persons and the barriers they face in accessing the supports they want. It is an inter-sectoral project that seeks to identify opportunities for systemic change—opportunities that remove the root barriers preventing access to the safety, security, and physical and mental health supports this population need and desire—rather than seeking to change these persons to adapt to discriminatory systems.

This project will impact and identify change opportunities in the following elements:

• Policies and practices
• Networks and collaborations
• Authority, voice and decision-making

In order to identify these opportunities, we will gather the insight and experience of individuals, communities and organizations that can identify the barriers vulnerable perinatal persons face. In particular, we will center the lived experiences of vulnerable perinatal persons themselves, as well as the perspectives of the front-line, community-based workers that serve them. These groups typically find themselves in a position of relatively less power, authority, and voice in the larger system and thus have an essential and insightful view on opportunities for effective systemic change. The project also plans to convene and disaggregate the perspectives of particular equity-deserving groups, such as vulnerable Indigenous and/or rural perinatal persons and related service providers.

This approach builds on the lessons learned by the Perinatal Collective, a group of more than 40 agencies that work together serving vulnerable people in the perinatal period in the Calgary area. This project hopes to encourage and support similar network-building and collaboration in other regions of the province.

The project will also highlight the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on vulnerable perinatal persons, as well as the impact it is having on the individual and coordinated systems and services they need.

The project will culminate with a symposium, in which the insights of vulnerable perinatal persons and the frontline workers that serve them are presented to system and services leaders, and a dialogue is facilitated among all stakeholders to discuss opportunities for systemic change. A report summarizing the engagement process and symposium will be delivered at the end of the project.

A small group of service providers will be gathered to help inform key components of the overall project development. This group will provide:

• Insight into a project name
• Clarity of project goals, objectives and operations
• Insight into engagement strategy opportunities and challenges

This group will meet for a facilitated working session to provide guidance on these areas.

Regional Advising Committees

Following this, three regional advisory committees will be formed and will provide input and guidance to engagement strategy development. These three committees are:

• North (North of Red Deer, but not including Edmonton)
• Central and South (Red Deer and south, but not including Calgary)
• Edmonton & Calgary

It is imperative that regional representation is balanced in the overall project framework because of the unique systems and service context that operate in each region. The intention is to surface these unique contexts, as well as integrate common themes between them in the project outcomes and recommendations.

We anticipate that the role of the regional advising committees will include, but are not limited to:

• Provide insight into the regional contexts, systems and service realities and challenges in supporting the vulnerable perinatal population in that region.
• Inform the project from their organizational, system and service perspectives.
• Connect the project operations team to people in the regions when an opportunity arises and support emerging champions
• Identify the equity-deserving groups within the region who must be connected to the project, either in an advising or informing capacity
• Steer the regional engagement strategy formation

Equity seeks to honour the full diversity of lived experiences, as well as account for the relative power of different stakeholders, within any given system.

In order to do this, we will be designing a process that will identify and account for voices that may not otherwise be heard in the following categories:

• Lived experiences of vulnerable perinatal women with specific approaches for BIPOC women
• Front-line service workers, with specific approaches for rural service providers