The Canadian Healthy Schools Alliance (the Alliance) is a network of organizations on a mission to promote health and well-being in school communities across Canada. Combining evidence-based and community-oriented approaches, the Alliance aims to help school leadership improve a wide variety of outcomes in their school and help them set students up for lifelong success.

With so many issues facing schools today, principals, administrators and other school system leaders must balance a number of competing priorities. The Alliance works to empower these leaders to address multiple priorities at once through a system-level framework for student and teacher well-being, which allows them to align their efforts and achieve their goals. By considering the whole school system, the Alliance offers leaders solutions that support the health and well-being of their school communities.

Ever Active Schools is part of the Stewardship team of the Alliance, along with Physical and Health Education (PHE) Canada, the Canadian Association of School Administrators (CASSA), Canadian School Boards Association (CSBA), Dedicated Action for School Health (DASH), Ontario Physical and Health Education Association (Ophea) and Settings-based Intervention Research through Changes in Lifestyles and Environments (SIRCLE Lab).

To learn more about the origin and goals of the Alliance, check out this video.

The Canadian Healthy Schools Alliance works to displace an antiquated paradigm about student well-being. According to the old way of thinking, students are isolated individuals with discrete inputs and outputs; provide them with a healthy breakfast and some physical activity, and the result is a student ready to learn.

In contrast to this individualistic and mechanical approach, the Alliance believes in a holistic view of student well-being that considers individual and community health simultaneously. This view considers social, relational and systemic dimensions of well-being, like fairness and equity, alongside an individual’s emotional state, the mental health of teachers and more.

Equipped with a comprehensive approach to well-being, the goal of the Alliance is to help every school in Canada tend to their community’s individual and collective health so that each and every student gets a fair chance at success.

In 2021, the Alliance launched the Canadian Healthy School Standards and a subsequent toolkit exploring how to implement the standards at a school system leadership level.