For the 50th anniversary of the Pediatric Research Foundation, Dimitra Papadopoulos and First Capital REIT are creating a research fellowship in the name of the neighbourhoods they builds. You can help move that research forward by becoming a donor.
Dimitra Papadopoulos
I have been giving to the Pediatric Research Foundation, but what convinced me to get even more involved, to join the campaign cabinet for the 50th and put my name on a fellowship, is where our work meets theirs. Our words are “thriving neighbourhoods.” Theirs is the trajectory of a child’s life. We build the places and they fund the research that helps a child grow up healthy in them. The same outcome, at two different scales. I had never looked at my work that way. And those three causes our employees chose all meet in a single one of the Foundation’s pillars.
That pillar is mental health, neurodevelopment and life trajectories. Trajectory is not an abstract word to someone who builds neighbourhoods, but it is the twenty years a child spends in one community, on one street, in one school, among the same neighbours. None of it is written in advance. With the right research, done early enough, we can give a child every chance.
My goal is to raise $120,000 to create the Healthy Neighbourhoods Fellowship. Two early-career researchers, three years, and work built to be used far beyond my own neighbourhoods. One question finally given the research it deserves: how do we improve the path a child is on? »
— Dimitra Papadopoulos, Vice President of Operations, Eastern & Western Canada, First Capital REIT
The fellowship created by Ms. Papadopoulos
The Healthy Neighbourhoods Fellowship is one of 25 fellowships the Foundation will award through its 50th anniversary competition. It carries this name because it is directed at the research that happens where children actually are: in their schools, their communities, their streets, rather than in a lab alone.
It gives a team of two researchers with fewer than ten years’ experience $120,000 over three years, enough to carry a project from question to findings without waiting on the long grant cycles that stall early careers.
Pillar 1 – Mental health, neurodevelopment and life trajectories
This pillar asks how a childhood unfolds: what shapes a developing brain, what breaks a trajectory, and how early you have to act to change one. It funds field research carried out in schools and communities, and it takes social, cultural and geographic inequality seriously.
The winning team will be selected through the 50th anniversary competition. Donors to this campaign will be able to follow their work to the end of the three years.
For 50 years, the Pediatric Research Foundation has supported research where everything begins. Today, it invites leaders and major donors to mark this anniversary with a commitment that carries weight, lasts, and transforms.
Your donation is a gesture of trust.
Your commitment is an act of vision.
Your impact begins now.