Introduction
This is the final report for From the Ground Up: Building Healthy Communities in Waterloo Region and Beyond. From the Ground Up (FGU) consisted primarily of a full day facilitation training and the Healthy Communities (HC) Forum, while also supporting and connecting to a number of related community events. The report focusses on the facilitation training held on April 20, 2002, and the Healthy Communities (HC) Forum held on May 3rd and 4th, 2002. This final report contains a brief history and overview of FGU, a summary and evaluation of the two events and some suggestions for the future.
The Facilitation Training and the Healthy Communities Forum brought together diverse groups of people from the different cities and townships in the Waterloo region (and some areas of southern Ontario), representing a wide variety of social, economic and environmental issues.
This report is organized into 5 sections. This introduction comprises the first section. The second section provides an overview and brief history of FGU. The third section describes and evaluates the Facilitation Training. Section four describes and evaluates the Healthy Communities Forum. The final section contains the lessons learned from the process of organizing this project and suggestions for the future.
Included in the report are a number of appendixes. See the Table of Contents for details.