LivingWorks Education receives 2002 Knowledge Broker Award

About the Awards | Presentation of the Award | Acceptance Remarks

2002 Canadian Policy Research
Knowledge Broker Award
National Policy Research Conference
Ottawa, Canada
October 24, 2002
Doug Barkley, EDS

Good evening ladies and gentlemen. It is a pleasure to be here tonight to honour this year’s recipient of the Knowledge Broker Award, LivingWorks Education.

Based in Calgary, Alberta, LivingWorks Education emerged out of a 1970's report stating there was core knowledge concerning suicide that had not been translated into effective prevention programs. To bridge this gap, LivingWorks facilitated the transformation of social science knowledge into a practical and widely disseminated community health program. Since its inception, it has developed a number of suicide intervention training packages that have been used by over 1500 trainers and over 250,000 participants in Canada, Australia, Norway and the United States.

Based on its work in Canada, LivingWorks was invited by the United Nations to convene world experts to develop a UN/WHO guide for national strategy development in suicide prevention. The results of this work were published in 1996 and have since been the reference point for the development of national strategies in a number of countries.

The combined impact of their policy into practice initiatives and transfer of practical knowledge into policy guidelines is unique.

I would now like to invite Richard Ramsay, President, LivingWorks Education, to accept the Knowledge Broker Award on behalf of his organization.