There are four great webinar opportunities around Active and Safe Routes to School and School Travel Planning coming up! More details are below, but please feel free to join Green Action Centre staff for the Safe Routes to School and Traffic Reduction webinar on January 31st from noon-1pm at the Eco-Centre - 3rd Floor, 303 Portage Avenue.

*Tuesday, January 24, 2012 (6:30 pm CT) One hour*Sustainable Happiness, Hope & Resiliency Presenters: Catherine O'Brien and Elin Kelsey

Join Catherine O'Brien and Elin Kelsey for an inspiring conversation about sustainable happiness, hope and resiliency. In the Summer 2011 issue of Green Teacher, Catherine and Elin introduced the concepts of sustainable happiness, hope and resiliency and why it's so important to move beyond "gloom and doom." In this webinar, they invite you to join them in a lively conversation about how these ideas are catching hold and causing ripples of optimism across the disciplines of environmental and sustainability education, health and well-being and conservation biology, and around the world. After short presentations, they will share some of the ways they are seeing this work moving out in the world so that participants can start to think of implications for their personal and professional life.

*Suitability:* All formal and non-formal youth educators

*Please register directly at:* http://greenteacherwebinarobrienkelsey2-eorg.eventbrite.com/

*Tuesday January 31st, 2012 (12pm CT) One hour**Pump Down the Volume: SRTS and Traffic Reduction*

Presenters: Nancy Pullen-Seufert, Associate Director, National Center for Safe Routes to School Melissa Watford, Health Education Specialist, FirstHealth of the Carolinas Jason Goldsberry, Physical Education Teacher, Eagle Crest Elementary School, Longmont, CO

Communities initiate Safe Routes to School programs for a variety of reasons. In an attempt to reduce the barriers for students to walk and bicycle to school, some programs focus on reducing traffic congestion and the number of cars around schools. In this sixty minute webinar, we will take a brief look at the problem of traffic congestion as it relates to SRTS and then focus on two SRTS programs that have had success in reducing congestion and measuring traffic reductions. The first program, Eagle Crest Elementary School's Step Often and Ride to School (SOAR) Program, surveyed families in order to understand travel patterns to school. After learning that 75 percent of students arrived by car, the program focused on increasing walking and bicycling rates through education and encouragement. After just one year, Eagle Crest saw a 40 percent reduction in motor vehicle traffic. The second program, Pinehurst Walks! from Pinehurst, NC, focused on encouraging the school's 650 students to become engaged as leaders in the effort to get more students walking to school. The Student Council presented neighborhood walkability recommendations to the Mayor and Village Council, resulting in a $150,000.00 allocation for a greenway to connect the elementary school to the Village. Their efforts also resulted in a 22 percent reduction in traffic volume on walking school bus days.

Don't miss this chance to see how these two wonderful programs succeeding in traffic reduction efforts!

This webinar is part of the Safe Routes to School Coaching Action Network Webinar Series, developed by America Walks and the National Center for Safe Routes to School. For more information please contact Michelle Gulley at mgulley@americawalks.org

REGISTER NOW https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/654857816 or join us at the Eco-Centre - 3rd Floor, 303 Portage Avenue from noon - 1 pm! * **Thursday February 2, 2012 (12 pm CT) One hour* *School Travel Planning: (Shared) Knowledge is Power!*

Presented in collaboration with The CAPTURE Project, as part of the Green Communities Canada School Travel Planning Series.

*Brief Description* Imagine being part of a national community where you have easy access to School Travel Planning stakeholders and can share information and learnings about your respective programs, policies or initiatives. CAPTURE (Canadian Platform to Increase Usage of Real-world Evidence) recently launched a freely accessible, knowledge exchange repository to find and share practice-based evidence in health promotion and chronic disease prevention. Looking beyond the published literature, CAPTURE seeks to harness the breadth of community-based knowledge and experience. *The CAPTURE Platform facilitates* · Connecting with colleagues around the corner or across the country · Sharing knowledge and wisdom from our health promotion and chronic disease prevention experiences · Documenting reflective practice learnings – knowledge which often remains untapped or difficult to find *The webinar will feature* · An orientation to the CAPTURE Platform with examples of School Travel Planning initiatives · Guidelines to capture and share reflective practice knowledge · How to enter the CAPTURE 10-minute Challenge - *and win an iPad 2! *

*Presenter* Dayna Albert, M.A. Manager, Practitioner Engagement, The CAPTURE Project Dayna holds an MA in adult education and a BSc from the University of Toronto. Dayna has six years’ experience building organizational capacity in evidence-informed practice. Previously, she worked with the Ontario Public Health Association’s Towards Evidence-Informed Practice Program. She is a member of the Canadian Evaluation Society and the American Evaluation Association.

*Who Should Attend?* All School Travel Planning stakeholders (i.e. program planners, municipal partners, school-based partners, funders etc.) who are interested in learning new ways to share their work, stay abreast of what others in the field are doing and understand how to capture and profit from their reflective practice learnings.

*To register, please contact dayna.albert@thecaptureproject.ca and provide your name, email address and time zone.* * **Wednesday February 15, 2012 (11 am CT) One hour* *Project BEAT: Integrating the key lessons of time, space and gender into STP*

A WIMBA presentation as part of the Green Communities Canada School Travel Planning Series Presenters: Michelle Stone and Guy Faulkner, University of Toronto.

The BEAT (Built Environment and Active Transport – www.beat.utoronto.cahttp://physical.utoronto.ca/Beat.aspx) project, funded by CIHR and the Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada was a large-scale, mixed methods and multidisciplinary research programme designed to explore how such a behavioural shift towards active school transport (AST) might be supported. In a series of sequential stages and studies we addressed AST at multiple levels – national, provincial (Ontario) and local (GTA). Our work has identified the prevalence and correlates of AST in Canada, and, has resulted in the creation of a unified theoretical model of AST and the built environment through examination of the personal, family, social and environmental correlates of active school transport.

The objective of this webinar is to present some of the key lessons learned from the BEAT project including data on the relationship between school travel and objectively measured physical activity levels of children. Our focus will be on three key lessons that have implications for the School Travel Planning (STP) model. We classify these lessons as three interrelated themes of *time, space and gender:*

*TIME*: The main purpose of STP is to help parents/guardians overcome perceptual barriers to the practice of actively traveling to school. These barriers typically focus on safety (e.g., traffic & stranger danger). However, the STP intervention itself does not explicitly address what appear to be key issues in school travel mode choice - the parental or caregiver ascription of convenience to the various travel modes available for school trips (i.e., the theme of “time”) and the level of independent mobility granted to the child.

*SPACE*: Participation in AST varies regionally and also across different types of space or neighbourhood. STP work has traditionally targeted the school environment, while our research also suggests that features of the built environment around the home play a more significant role in the school travel mode decision-making process.

*GENDER*: The school travel experience is very different for girls than it is for boys. Fewer girls engage in AST and parental perceptions regarding school travel are different for girls than they are for boys. Girls are granted less independent mobility than boys; the ramifications are likely contributing to the lower levels of physical activity and less outdoor play time observed in girls. Modifications to built form may affect girls differently than they would boys.

Throughout this webinar, we will provide an overview of the evidence underpinning each theme and facilitate discussion on how each lesson is, or could be, integrated into STP implementation.

*Please register directly with Sandra Jones, Green Communities Canada: scjones@telus.net*