EduTOX
The EduTOX Video Challenge is a national, bilingual youth video contest aimed at raising awareness of environmental health risks amongst youth. The EduTOX Video Challenge called on youth aged 14 to 22 to make 1-2 minute videos about toxins in our day-to-day lives, their potential health effects, and how we can avoid them. Through collaboration with various Canadian youth, education, health and environment focused organizations, including Health Canada’s Risk Management Bureau, EduTOX was a highly successful campaign that ran in 2016 and 2017. The key objective of EduTOX was to raise awareness of potential risks, and of actions that Canadian youth can take to protect their health.
EduTOX emerged out of a key recommendation from the Prenatal Environmental Health Education (PEHE) Forum, which was to design and implement a youth focused environmental health literacy program and support innovative social media campaigns, competitions or other activities aimed at engaging youth. Adolescents and young adults are a particularly important population to target for environmental health education due to the significant impacts environmental exposures can have on their health and that of their future children over the long term, as well as the potential that exists to change behaviours around purchasing practices, diet and other day-to day activities before they become lifelong habits. It is also be anticipated that by engaging youth as educators, messages will be better received by their peers and ultimately will be more likely to affect personal change and encourage them as the leaders and decision-makers of tomorrow.
Health Canada and Pollution Probe provided funding to develop and run EduTOX. Pollution Probe, The Sandbox Project, The David Suzuki Foundation, Great West Life, TELUS and Terra 20 donated prizes. Our many partners provide significant in-kind contributions including youth outreach support.
In 2017, a total of 84 videos were submitted, up 60% from 2016. Winners were unanimously selected through collaboration between our celebrity judges and expert project partners. Winning videos were judged to: be accurate, informative, and thorough; adequately cover potential exposures and health risks, steps to reduce exposures and/or otherwise support positive change; and, be interesting to watch and visually appealing for youth. The 2016 and 2017 winning videos can be found below.