If Everyone Was Home, Why Weren't We Overflowing? 

A case for taking prevention as seriously as we take a crisis 

When COVID sent Alberta home, I started a new job at KARA Family Resource Centre (KARA) sitting in an enormous, empty building wondering what exactly I had signed up for. The playroom was empty. The waiting area was empty. I spent my days logging into virtual programs, entering data, and answering phones that rang far less than they used to, until the calls themselves started to change. Parents described isolation they didn't have words for before. New parenting questions nobody used to ask out loud. Bored, restless kids. Quiet worry about whether a child's development was on track, or whether school readiness was slipping while everyone was stuck at home. 

Then I noticed something happening inside the virtual programs themselves. I watched parents' shoulders visibly relax when they recognized the same behaviour in someone else's child that they'd been quietly worrying about in their own home. Nobody assessed anyone. Nobody diagnosed a child. Nobody opened a case file. A parent simply realized it was not just them. That relief, multiplied across a screen full of strangers, was doing something our healthcare and crisis systems aren't built to do. It was prevention, working in real time, for free, inside a program most of the city didn't know existed. 

Which is what has bothered me ever since: if everyone was home, why weren't these programs overflowing? 

I'm a numbers person, and I was the one entering the data behind the scenes, so I went looking for an answer — first in Alberta, then across Canada, then internationally. What I found wasn't that prevention is some foreign idea nobody understands. We understand preventative maintenance on a car. We understand an annual physical. We understand screening for illness before it's advanced. But when it comes to one of the largest and hardest jobs most people will ever do, raising a family, we tend to introduce support only after someone is already struggling. 

That contradiction is the argument of this piece, and I want to state it plainly: we have built real, functioning prevention infrastructure across this province, and most families do not know it exists. Meanwhile, the systems they turn to when prevention does not  happen, emergency healthcare, classrooms, child intervention services, are visibly straining under the weight of need arriving too late. Alberta's largest hospitals have been operating above 102 percent capacity, with the Alberta Medical Association calling on the province to declare a public health state of emergency over the strain The Gauntlet. Class sizes climbed high enough, and complex enough, that the province is now spending $200 million to hire roughly 1,500 more teachers, just to bring the provincial average down from 25 students to 22 CBE. And in child intervention, close to 40 percent of practitioners province-wide, and a majority of those in the Edmonton region, have been carrying caseloads above the provincial benchmark of 13 files, some in the high teens or low twenties CBC News. None of these systems are strained because the people in them aren't trying. They're strained because they are absorbing need that, in many cases, could have been caught and addressed earlier, more quietly, and at a fraction of the cost. 

We're not without evidence that earlier support pays off. The most-cited economic modelling on early childhood programs puts the return on investment at roughly 13 percent annually for children from birth to five Heckman Equation. There's a substantial, decades-deep body of research on early childhood development, protective factors, early intervention, social determinants of health, and adverse childhood experiences, and it's rigorous. What I don't think we have is research that captures the cumulative economic value of community-based prevention infrastructure as a system — not one flagship program studied in isolation, but the whole quiet ecosystem of family resource organizations, parenting programs, and community connectors working together, province-wide, over time. 

I see the gap between what we know and what we've built play out constantly. I'm at resource fairs, networking events, community meetings, and I have some version of the same conversation over and over. Someone learns what a family resource organization actually does, and their face changes: "Where was this when my kids were little?" The honest answer is almost absurd… we've been here. KARA, where I work, was founded in 1984. Organizations like it have operated across Edmonton and this province for decades. So the first barrier isn't funding, or capacity, or even trust. It is awareness, not awareness of any single organization, but awareness that prevention-based family support exists at all, as something ordinary you reach for, not a last resort you stumble into. 

Imagine if that weren't true. Planning a family, you'd know to look for your local family resource organization the way you would look for a family doctor. Bringing home a newborn, you would know where to meet other parents and ask the questions you are  too embarrassed to ask anyone else. Raising a toddler, you would  know where to raise a development question early, before it becomes a referral. Parenting across two cultures at once, you would know an organization exists specifically to help you navigate that. Raising a school-age kid, you would know support does not have to wait until something has gone wrong. What would change if connecting families to prevention were as ordinary as connecting them to a school or a public library? 

I don't think community-based prevention is the answer to the pressure on Alberta's hospitals, classrooms, and child intervention system. That would be an overreach, but I am increasingly convinced it needs to be part of that conversation, and right now we don't have the evidence to say how large a part. The research questions I keep returning to are specific. What happens downstream when families connect with support earlier? What interventions get avoided entirely? Where do the costs shift instead of disappearing? What protective factors strengthen, and what does that compound into over five years, ten years, a generation? Underneath all of it sits a harder question nobody's built a methodology for: who is measuring the crisis that didn't happen? 

I don't know where that research agenda starts. Maybe it is a project for our post-secondary institutions. Maybe it requires government, funders, Family Resource Networks, healthcare, education, and families sitting at the same table, which happens less often than it should. Maybe there are researchers already asking these exact questions whom the rest of us simply haven't met yet. What I know is that I want to be part of finding out, and I don't think this is a conversation Alberta can afford to keep putting off. 



Prevention is quiet work. When it goes well, there is rarely a dramatic intervention to point to afterward, just a family that feels a little more connected, a parent who feels more confident, a concern caught early instead of late, someone who knew where to turn before things became a crisis instead of after. Quiet work needs amplifiers: researchers willing to help us actually measure it, funders willing to ask different questions than the ones they are used to answering, organizations willing to collaborate instead of competing for the same narrow slice of attention, and journalists and policymakers willing to talk publicly about what happens before a crisis, not only what happens after one. Because the question in front of us is not only how to build better systems to respond when families struggle. It is whether we are willing to invest in understanding, and building, the village around them before they do.