Good morning. To begin, we would like to thank you for having invited us to make a presentation on the prevention of illness and health promotion, and more particularly on healthy eating habits.
I will give you a brief overview of our organization, Québec en Forme, and my colleague, Manon Paquette, will speak to the strategies we have adopted to promote healthy eating habits.
Québec en Forme is a non-profit organization which is the result of a partnership agreement with the Government of Quebec. It includes seven departments, three governmental organizations and one private foundation, the Lucie et André Chagnon Foundation.
Funding for Québec en Forme comes from the Fund for the promotion of a healthy lifestyle. This fund has $480 million for a 10-year period, which extends from 2007 to 2017.
Québec en Forme supports projects which promote healthy eating habits and a physically active lifestyle at the local level, that is, at the community, regional and provincial level.
The board of directors has 12 members, half of which represent the Government of Quebec, and half of which represent the Lucie et André Chagnon Foundation.
Our mission is to mobilize people and all of Quebec society to adopt and maintain a more physically active lifestyle and healthy eating habits, which are essential to the development of Quebec youth.
Our vision is that young Quebeckers eat healthy foods and be physically active, two lifestyle habits which local communities, decision-makers, all of society, and the parents of young people, recognize as being essential elements to their full development and success at school.
This is the vision we wish to translate into reality. So what we are talking about are young people who are active and who eat well, communities that are mobilized and do what it takes to achieve that goal, healthy eating habits and an active lifestyle, things which are recognized as being essential elements to the full development of young people.
We have just finished the new strategic planning exercise, in which we developed three strategic orientations. The first is the mobilization of communities, and the second revolves around changing the environment in which young people live. My colleague will speak more fully to what we are doing with regard to changing living environments, as well as transforming social standards.
The choice of these themes is based on the many experiences we have had on the ground since 2002, as well as on what the scientific literature recommends to introduce real changes in our society. It must be understood that our objectives complement the Plan d’action gouvernemental de promotion des saines habitudes de vie et de prévention des problèmes reliés au poids 2006-2012 — Investir pour l’avenir, of the Government of Quebec.
The objective is to increase, especially in underprivileged areas, the percentage of young people who eat well and are physically active.
I will talk about the first objective, which is the mobilization of communities. In our view, mobilizing communities means bringing people together to achieve something, to commit towards a common objective, and to become responsible for one's actions with the intent of reaching a common goal. It means making the decision to participate in a movement which brings organizations and people together, who are concerned by these two lifestyle habits.
We have people on the ground who work with local groups of partners to increase their ability to help influence the behaviour of young people. It is also a matter of mobilizing regional, provincial or national actors, to help them meet the needs of local communities, and to help them pool their resources in response to these needs, or at least to complement each other in their work. We are ultimately trying to break down silos, to get people to share our vision and to contribute their resources, as well as provide our support, to Québec en Forme, so that together we commit to a collective plan for change.
So, we both support local groups—