Three applicants have now been selected to receive seed funding of up to $7,500 to develop and deliver a physical activity program. We have also invited three other organizations that applied for support to participate in the training and pilot program, but without funding from the Minding Our Bodies project. Together, these six organizations will help us to evaluate the effectiveness of the resources we are creating.

The Canadian Mental Health Association, Ontario wishes to thank all of the organizations who submitted an application to become a Minding Our Bodies pilot site. We received more than 20 unique proposals to develop physical activity programs for people with mental illness. We were excited and encouraged to see many of those applicants reach out into their communities to create partnerships with other organizations for the benefit of the consumers they support.

Staff and volunteers from the pilot sites will attend a training session in April 2009. From May through November, the pilot organizations are responsible for planning, implementing and evaluating new physical activity programs for people with serious mental illness. The purpose of the pilot phase is to assess the strengths of the Minding Our Bodies toolkit and training session and to identify gaps and areas for improvement. When the final toolkit is released in early 2010, the pilot programs will be showcased and serve as examples for other organizations that want to use the toolkit.
 
To ensure that the toolkit will be effective in addressing the barriers and needs of various organizations in both urban and rural settings, the pilot sites represent a diverse cross-section of service providers. They differ in geography, population served, and size and type of organization, as well as in their proposed physical activity programs.

The three organizations that will receive funding as Minding Our Bodies pilot sites are the Gerstein Crisis Centre in Toronto; Canadian Mental Health Association, Thunder Bay Branch; and Haldimand-Norfolk Resource Centre, with sites in Simcoe and Dunnville. The three additional pilot sites are Search Community Mental Health Services, in Strathroy; Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre in Toronto; and Community Resource Connections of Toronto.

Congratulations to all of the organizations who have been selected to become Minding Our Bodies pilots!