#PHSI25: Building Wellbeing Societies

Wednesday, June 25^th, 2025 – ONLINE!

Registration is Now Open, Click Here to Register!

The Public Health Association of British Columbia is proud to host the 2025 Summer Institute, a virtual event that will explore what it means to build a Wellbeing Society—one that prioritizes people, planet, and future generations. Drawing inspiration from the World Health Organization’s Geneva Charter for Well-being (2022), this year’s Institute invites public health professionals, researchers, academics, policymakers, and advocates to reimagine the role of public health in shaping a fairer, healthier, and more sustainable world.

The 2025 Summer Institute offers more than dialogue—it is a space for strategic thinking, systems exploration, and cross-sector collaboration. Through keynote discussions, facilitated conversations, and interactive sessions, attendees will reflect on how the public health field can lead in co-creating communities that are just, regenerative, and deeply rooted in wellbeing.

Join us as we imagine—and begin to build—a future in which public health is a driving force for societal transformation.

Summer Institute Details

Dates: June 25th, 2025
Venue: Online via Zoom
Price: $40 +GST
Member/Student/Retiree Price: $30 +GST

Register Today!

Summer Institute Goal

The goal of the 2025 Summer Institute is to convene a diverse group of public health professionals and practitioners, students, researchers, scholars, academics, thought leaders, intersectoral partners, activists, and allied organizations to collaboratively explore and advance the concept of Building Wellbeing Societies & Communities.

The Institute will aim to introduce this theme through the prioritization of health and equity, cross-sector collaboration, holistic solutions, and inclusive approaches, while emphasizing methods for addressing social and structural determinants of health and translating ideas into actionable public health strategies.

Scientific Program Committee Co-Chairs

Dr. Trevor Hancock

Retired Professor & Senior Scholar
School of Public Health & Social Policy
Associate Member of the Faculty of Graduate Studies, University of Victoria

Dr. Trevor Hancock is a public health physician and health promotion consultant. He ‘retired’ in 2018 from his role as Professor and Senior Scholar at the School of Public Health and Social Policy at the University of Victoria.
He is one of the founders of the (now global) Healthy Cities and Communities movement and co-founded both the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment and the Canadian Coalition for Green Health Care, and was the first leader of the Green Party of Canada in the 1980s.
His recent focus has been the combination of his two main areas: The relationship between human health and the natural environment – among other things he led a major CPHA report on the Ecological Determinants of Health, released in 2015 – and linking the healthy and sustainable community approaches through the concept of a ‘One Planet’ region.
In ‘retirement’ he has started a new NGO, Conversations for a One Planet Region, to explore and popularise these ideas locally; works with Doctors for Planetary Health in BC; is the interim Convenor of the emerging Canadian Coalition for Planetary Health and a Wellbeing Society, and is a member of the IUHPE’s Global Working Group on Waiora Planetary Health.

Dr. Lindsay McLaren

Professor, Department of Community Health Sciences, University of Calgary
Research Associate, Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives

Lindsay McLaren PhD is a Professor in the Department of Community Health Sciences at the University of Calgary where her scholarship and teaching focus on social determinants and political economy of health. She is also a Research Associate with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (National Office).
For her research in dental public health, Lindsay held a CIHR/PHAC Applied Public Health Chair award (2014-19) and received the 2019 CIHR-IPPH Trailblazer Award (mid-career category) which is a career achievement award that recognizes exceptional contributions in population and public health research.
Lindsay is past-president (2014-18) of the Alberta Public Heath Association and currently serves as Senior Editor for the Canadian Journal of Public Health. She also serves as Co-Editor in Chief for the Journal of Critical Public Health, which is a community non-profit journal formed following a mass editorial board resignation from corporate publishers.