Ontario Royal Agricultural Winter Fair

To Our Good Health - Youth Engagement

Led by Drs. Cameron Norman, Public Health Sciences, University of Toronto (UofT), and Alex Jadad, Public Health Sciences (UofT), the Centre for Global eHealth Innovation, and geni (Global eHealth & Wellness Network Initiative), this project is designed to discover what matters most to urban and rural youth of Ontario, and gearing results towards developing healthier food choices and enhanced lifelong health.


In today's society, agriculture is having an increasingly important affect on the health and wellbeing of people, worldwide.   In Canada alone, concern about escalating rates of obesity and its related consequences has raised the profile of what we consume into one of the main priorities of government.   Canadians are witnessing an increasingly alarming rate of obesity, even in the young.   As a result, the importance of the production and marketing of food and the role it can play in helping to resolve this crisis cannot be downplayed.

Linking local experiences provided through the RWF with the networking power of information and communication technologies (ICTs), we plan to engage youth and young adults in a new form of dialogue about food, environmental, health, and social issues.   In this way, we hope to create unprecedented learning and leadership opportunities for young people to make positive changes in their world from the local to the global level.

This proposal uses a strategy designed to identify priorities that align with the RWF and will uncover research-based projects that youth will lead and take action on in their own communities. This agenda will support further RWF initiatives in the broad areas or ‘pillars’ of agriculture - food security, healthy living, and the environment  - and will provide the basis for a consortium of interested parties to promote related research agendas in Canada.