Heroes in Mind, Advocacy and Research Consortium

An important partnership is building infrastructure to improve mental health and resilience support for Canadian military members, Veterans, public safety personnel, essential service providers and their families, who face disproportionate trauma exposure and occupational stress. Existing supports are often fragmented, difficult to navigate, and insufficiently informed by the lived experiences of those they serve.

AbSPORU’s partnership with the Heroes in Mind, Advocacy and Research Consortium (HiMARC) is addressing this gap by embedding patient-oriented research (POR) approaches that support resilience, recovery, and post traumatic growth through sustained partnerships, meaningful engagement of people with lived and living experience, and implementation approaches that move evidence into practice.

The Role of AbSPORU

AbSPORU’s expertise in implementation science, knowledge mobilization, evaluation, and learning health systems was key to complementing the HiMARC team’s extensive knowledge of trauma-informed research, clinical innovation, community engagement, and military and Veteran health.

AbSPORU supported the co-design and development of the Resilience Hub, an online platform designed to provide accessible, curated mental health and resilience resources. This work emphasized designing with communities rather than for communities, ensuring that individuals with lived and living experience informed priorities, accessibility considerations, usability, communications approaches, and resource development to ensure that solutions reflected the needs of the communities they were intended to serve.

The role of AbSPORU spanned multiple HiMARC initiatives and included:

• Supporting engagement and co-design activities
• Facilitating implementation planning
• Conducting usability testing
• Supporting resource identification, curation, and accessibility reviews
• Developing knowledge mobilization and dissemination products
• Contributing to strategic planning and systems-level engagement activities

The Impact of AbSPORU

By supporting national knowledge mobilization activities for the Canadian Military, Veteran and Family Connected Campus Consortium, AbSPORU helped translate insights from national dialogues and symposia into practical resources and actionable recommendations for institutional leaders, policymakers, and community partners.

This included the implementation and scale-up of innovative trauma interventions such as Multi-Modal Motion Assisted Memory Desensitization and Reconsolidation (3MDR); and the Canadian Military, Veteran and Family Connected Campus Consortium, which supports military-connected learners and their families through coordinated national partnerships

Broader Impacts and Sustainability

Beyond the project’s immediate objectives, HIMARC addresses a significant challenge at the intersection of health and national defence, recognizing that protecting the health and well-being of military personnel is essential to Canada’s operational readiness and defence capabilities.

This partnership is an important demonstration of how POR can move beyond project-based engagement to become embedded within long-term systems transformation. The resulting infrastructure, partnerships, and implementation processes have applicability across other trauma-affected populations.

Together, and with AbSPORU’s involvement, these innovations moved from isolation to components of an integrated and scalable resource ecosystem that supports wellbeing, recovery, and long-term resilience for those who serve and protect Canada.

To learn more, watch the presentation “Powering the Future of Military and Health Research through Strategic Partnerships“ from our 2026 Collaborative Forum.