Mission, Vision and Approach

Our mission

Our mission is to conduct community-engaged research with schools and communities across the Rocky Mountain region to achieve health equity by optimizing social-emotional, mental, and physical health.

Our vision

Our vision is that children and families live in communities that optimize health and well-being.

Our approach

Our approach includes:

• Conducting community-engaged research to develop, implement, and evaluate multi-level interventions to enhance mental health, well-being, and substance abuse among families residing in underserved communities. [intervention development/testing]
• Leveraging local, regional, and national partnership networks to disseminate, translate, and advocate evidence-based programs and policies to enhance youth health and well-being. [D/I; translational science]
• Identifying, promoting, and implementing innovative ways to link clinics to communities to promote mental health, wellbeing, and substance abuse among pregnant and parenting people and caregivers. [health systems/policy]
• Partnering with early child education centers to deliver programming to promote healthy eating, physical activity, and overall well-being among youth. [public health practice]
• Applying a biopsychosocial approach, to analyze multi-level, longitudinal data to identify and develop mechanistic pathways to inform the type and timing of future intervention strategies to promote perinatal and youth outcomes.  [population and epidemiologic studies]
• Collaborating with organizations by providing high-quality program evaluation and surveillance services to strengthen community capacity by training the current and future workforce to optimize family and child well-being. [workforce training and evaluation]