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Initiative

Yukon First Nations Child and Family Services Mapping

A systems mapping process to clarify roles, relationships, and prevention pathways across jurisdictions, strengthening a shared foundation for collaborative change.

Relational Infrastructure Knowledge Commons Impact Verticals
Status
Completed
Timeline
2023-2024
Lead Partner
Yukon Government (Child and Family Services)
Partners
14 Yukon First Nations, Federal Government

The Challenge

A Complex System with Overlapping Responsibilities

Child and Family Services sits inside a dense web of actors, mandates, and lived realities. In Yukon, this includes relationships across federal and territorial responsibilities and 14 Yukon First Nations, alongside community service ecosystems.

The system faces three practical barriers that mapping can help address:

  • A need to clarify the current system and jurisdictional roles
  • A need to build a stronger shared understanding of how the Child Welfare system functions in Yukon
  • A need to see, side by side, what partners are currently doing across prevention activities

The Response

Mapping the System

This work used a systems mapping workshop sequence (including a second mapping round) to refine a shared map and support conversations related to system-level agreements.

Key design elements included:

  • A shared definition of systems mapping as a visual way to depict variables, relationships, actors, causes, and feedback loops
  • A prevention framing influenced by public health, organized into primary, secondary, and tertiary prevention
  • A structured prompt for each partner to identify programs and services at each level of prevention
  • A guiding star statement to keep actions aligned to a desired future system, even as the system adapts over time

Guiding Principles

What Grounds the Work

The materials surfaced a set of proposed guiding principles, including:

  • Safety and wellbeing is paramount
  • The best interest of the child
  • Cultural continuity
  • Substantive equality
  • Distinct needs and circumstances

Key Tensions

Edges That Require Ongoing Care

  • Aligning prevention investments with acute demand in tertiary supports
  • Updating agreements while protecting trust, capacity, and cultural continuity
  • Making the map actionable in a shifting social, political, and economic landscape

What We're Learning

Why Mapping Matters

  • A map can function as shared language for a complex system, not just a diagram
  • Clarifying jurisdiction helps reduce duplication and surface gaps without blame
  • A guiding star creates coherence across many small, realistic interventions

Our Role

Systems Thinking and Facilitation

Sustainable Impact Foundation contributed systems thinking practice, facilitation support, and knowledge mobilization that helped partners translate complexity into a usable, shared picture of the system.

Related Focus Areas

Connected themes

03

Relational Infrastructure

Voice, legitimacy, and participation in decisions that affect communities.

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06

Impact Verticals

Child and family wellbeing as a system challenge.

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Interested in this work?

If you are working in child wellbeing, prevention systems, or Indigenous-led system redesign, we welcome conversations that explore shared learning and respectful collaboration.

Get in Touch