Overview
The Lawson Centre for Child Nutrition is a well-established, multi-disciplinary network of researchers and educators with the goal of improving nutrition in children, families and communities, in Canada and globally.
Since 2016, the research community built around the Lawson Centre has significantly expanded the base of evidence around healthy child development, the value of nutrition interventions in children’s health and disease prevention, food and nutrition policy, nutrient sensing and personalized health, food behaviours in families and global child nutrition. Lawson Centre staff, faculty and partners have also built relationships with healthcare providers, community centres and policy influencers to bring new knowledge and tools into practice.
In 2024, the Lawson Centre undertook a transparent, community-based strategic planning process to explore how to sustain, strengthen and expand its impact.
Through a thoughtful, generative planning process that included researchers, staff, leaders, partners in the child health space, advice from an external review and interviews with funders, the Lawson Centre developed a new strategic framework for the next three years.
This framework emphasizes translational research with the potential for measurable, real-world impact, focusing on cultivating explicit pathways for researchers to connect knowledge to action, through capacity-building, changing practice and strengthening advocacy.
Vision and Mission
Lifelong health through better child nutrition.
Support research, education and policy with clear pathways to improve nutrition in children, families and communities in Canada and globally.
Developing the Strategy
The Lawson Centre partnered with The Potential Group to create a collaborative process to engage diverse voices. These conversations built on each other, exploring both the impact and strengths of the work to date and the potential for increasing the value of the Centre's work.
The process took place over several months in 2024, including:
- A steering committee of 10 leaders
- A virtual retreat in June 2024 that brought together 32 leaders, researchers and partners in child health
- In-person retreat in September 2024 with 20 Lawson Centre staff, researchers and collaborators
- Framework refinement by the steering committee
Theory of Change
There is no direct, fully predictable pathway between the generation of knowledge about child nutrition and changing practices and habits. Influencing change requires embracing the principles of complexity theory, which recognizes that in unpredictable shifting systems, change is not linear, cannot be controlled from the centre and occurs through the intersection of self-organizing emergent ideas and connections.
Taking a complex adaptive system approach to influencing change means creating a high level, shared direction that has meaning across different dimensions, and then creating the conditions for people to move toward it in their own unique ways.
To change human behaviour at the systemic level, good knowledge and facts are not sufficient. Successful change creates room for experimentation, prototyping, relationship building and seizing emergent opportunities. Success is not measured in the direct, anticipated outcomes of any single initiative but the cumulative impact of diverse and sometimes divergent actions over multiple spheres.
Pathway to Impact
Pathway # 1: Build Capacity
Goal: Communities, families, and organizations pivotal to improving child nutrition will be participating in generating knowledge and resources that are most meaningful to them, and will be able to bring new ideas into their day to day lives.
Pathway # 2: Change Practice
Goal: Child nutrition will be recognized as an essential aspect of improving children's health, especially for equity-deserving groups, and all practitioners who support kids and families will have access to resource and knowledge to readily integrate into their work.
Pathway # 3: Empower Advocacy
Goal: Decision-makers and advocates for child health and health equity will have adaptable, available resources to influence programs and policy that support food security, healthier food choices for families, school programs and prenatal health.