Conference session

Beautiful Mind Day is a bi-annual event created by Erin Mills Connects (EMC) that promotes mental health and leadership amongst elementary and middle school students. Over the past three years, the Centre for Child Development, Mental Health, and Policy (CCDMP), University of Toronto Mississauga has worked closely with EMC and a community advisory group to develop and deliver research-informed curriculum that promote emotion regulation and empathy. This includes prosocial skills, such as cooperating and helping others, which support children’s academic success, positive behaviours, and overall well-being (Malti & Dys, 2018; Malti, 2021; Speidel et al., 2023). The objective of our talk is to share our learnings with the HSS community, including: • Community engagement and partnership development for long-term impact, including local and international cooperation in co-creating accessible knowledge translation outputs. • Promoting capacity building to empower the community while upholding the notion that we are all continually learning from one another, which has allowed us to be more attuned and responsive to community strengths and needs. • Applying science to inform the community about human emotions and their connection to mental health and well-being, observing the uptake of evidence-based practices when bolstered by experience-gained knowledge. It is our hope that this talk will allow us to continue building and refining knowledge exchange pathways between research and practice which are sustainable and pragmatic. We wish to connect with and learn alongside others who are also interested in creating research-practice connections which expand our collective knowledge base in ways which are innovative, inclusive, and empowering.