Where do youth in crisis turn? To the phones that never leave their hands? To friends? To the emergency department, perhaps taken there by desperate family?

Studies done in Peel, just west of Toronto, suggest youth are much more likely to turn to friends, siblings, parents and faith leaders than to teachers, telephone help lines or community crisis workers. They also show the region’s population is comprised of 58 per cent minority ethnic groups. People from different cultures and beliefs react differently to mental health and addiction issues.

Those factors may be keeping youth from getting the help they need, so their first point of contact with mental health and addiction services is in a crisis — often through the emergency department or justice system, according to Elise Hodson, of George Brown College.

She is project director for a team from George Brown and the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health that is looking for ways that will work to connect youth in crisis with services.

“Our goal is to work with youth, find out what kind of support they need and see what role technology can play in preventing and managing crisis.”

Their definition of crisis is broad, because what has an impact on mental health and addiction varies by individual and context. “It can be any situation where they felt overwhelmed and unable to cope on their own — homelessness, a break up, failing in school,” said Hodson.

The project is running on a grant from the Social Services and Humanities Research Council’s Community and College Social Innovation Fund. The Peel Services Collaborative (one of 18 set up around the province to close gaps in mental health and addiction care for children and youth) is a collaborator.

The plan is to create a digital crisis planning tool designed to develop care plans for youth and their families that draw on natural supports, and focuses on person-centred care rather than expert-driven services. Ideally, the plan will be used to keep an issue from escalating into a crisis.

Hodson is chair of the School of Design at George Brown; its role in the project is to design interactive technology that will connect youth in crisis with the support they need. They hope to show how interactive design can improve communication and relationships between users and service deliverers, but it is too soon to say what that will look like. Hodson said there is a “staggering” number of mental health apps available, many of which are well-intentioned but poorly designed, often not backed with any counselling expertise.

The design process will be collaborative, including youth, friends and family as well as 15 service providers, 10 interaction design students and faculty from George Brown, and staff from The Centre for Addiction and Mental Health’s Provincial System Support Program. The team also includes Co-Design’s Connie Chisholm, a designer and educator who brings design students and marginalized groups together to collaborate on projects.

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Showing very small children how to use a tool that was invented after you started teaching is not easy. How to do it in a way that advances learning while using the full range of what the tool has to offer is a challenge for the researchers who are studying the best uses of the tablet computer.

Tablets weren’t available when today’s crop of early childhood educators and kindergarten teachers did their training. As a result, they don’t know how to help students use tablets effectively, according to Monica McGlynn-Stewart, of George Brown College’s Centre for Early Childhood Development.

Nor does anyone else, judging by the lack of research on the topic, said McGlynn-Stewart, principal investigator on a project called “Toys or tools? Using tablet computers for open-ended literacy learning.” If you accept that computers will continue to change the way we live, it only makes sense to adapt teaching to use digital technology from the earliest years, she explained. The goal of her project is to explore effective ways to do that. “We have to figure out the way to use it to help children become resourceful, creative, critical problem solvers.”

Toys or tools is one of 27 projects funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council through its Community and College Social Innovation Fund. It’s a partnership between George Brown and the Peel District School Board, where McGlynn-Stewart is working with researcher and instructional coach Tiffany MacKay. Three tablet computers have been introduced in each of the 14 classrooms in both Peel Region and several of George Brown’s “lab schools” (which offer early learning and care to infants through to full-day kindergarten children while training college students).

One advantage to computers in the classroom is they may level the playing field. Many children are taught to use technology at home. Others may never do more than play a game on a phone. In later grades, when they need to put together a project or do research, some children (usually those already disadvantaged) will be left behind.

The tablets in the project run an app called 30 Hands. It has many functions but no content — the children are not watching cartoons. Instead, it makes the tablet another tool (or toy), like crayons or modelling clay. They can draw pictures right on it, or take photos or make videos and sound recordings of their stories, observations and plans. A child might, for instance, make a model in clay, then make a video tape of it, describing what they made and why. That is reflective learning, and it’s a cornerstone of effective learning at every level.

Classroom educators are supported in the project by George Brown students, who visit weekly to troubleshoot, and share ideas from the other classrooms they visit. The researchers also observe classrooms regularly, to see how tablets are deployed and answer questions. Focus group meetings give the educators opportunities to get together and talk about what is working, or not, in their classes.

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With their phone numbers out there and their BlackBerrys always in their hands, Toronto’s Neighbourhood Police Team members are just a call or a text away. Their job is to listen to what’s worrying people who live in some of the city’s toughest areas, calm their fears and help them act to make things better. But is it working?

With help of a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, researchers from Humber College are trying to answer that question — and at the same time, move Toronto into an era of “evidence-based policing.”

“The Toronto police are really under pressure to look at efficiencies and economies but there is a real commitment to not cutting the wrong things,” said Jeanine Webber, associate dean of the School of Social and Community Services at Humber College in Toronto. “They understand there may be costs to this program that in the long term may pay off and they need to be conscious of that.”

Webber is director of a Community and College Social Innovation Fund project, using a grant from SSHRC to assess the impact of the Toronto Police Service’s Neighbourhood Policing Program. The two year project will conduct a far-reaching evaluation of how effective the neighbourhood officers have been toward their goals of reducing crime, improving relations between Toronto police and the community, and making residents feel safer in their neighbourhoods.

Neighbourhood police were introduced in 2013, in response to poor community-police relations. The officers are directly accessible, their cell phone numbers easily available. They put their time into getting to know people, listening, and — if possible — dealing with issues before they become crimes, or picking up intelligence on criminal activity.

There is a well-established relationship between Toronto police and Humber College, which offers a police foundations diploma, a bachelor of applied arts in criminal justice and a police leadership program, the last designed for officers who do not have college or university degrees. The longstanding partnership between Toronto police and Humber was why the Service earlier turned to Webber and her team to do an evaluation of neighbourhood policing, but it was a limited pilot study, done only in English and excluding youth, a population police have particular difficulties with.

The SSHRC Social Innovation grant has made it possible to expand the pilot, assessing 44 months of operation, all 17 neighbourhood teams instead of just eight, adding focus groups and surveys in a variety of languages and including youth from 14 to 18. It should produce a much more detailed picture of the impact of the program. “We have trends that indicate neighbourhood policing is meeting its goals,” said Webber, “But I want to be able to collect data from a wider group to make sure it is.”

The project is a good opportunity for several Humber students interested in aspects of policing to learn more about the topic and about research skills, who will be involved in collecting and analysing data. The project coordinator is a Humber graduate who just earned an MA in criminal justice.

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