Turn lived experience into better understanding, then into better support.
Building GRAND-Families has worked with researchers, practitioners, funders and policy partners to document grandfamily experiences, develop interventions and bring caregiver voices into public conversations.
Parental substance use is prominent in the grandfamilies research.
In the 2022 PEI qualitative study, 11 of the 12 participating grandparents had adult children living with mental illness and/or substance use disorders that left them unable to provide care. This is not a province-wide prevalence estimate, but it shows why Building GRAND-Families treats parental substance use as a major subject area.
Measure whether services actually help families connect.
Evaluating kinship support programs
Read Evaluating kinship support programsGRAND-Families Camp 2026 outcomes
See how we evaluated the 2026 camp, what caregivers, children and staff told us, and what we learned about connection, respite, belonging, confidence and future programming.
See what we learned from the 2026 campUse an operating navigation service to show where kinship families get stuck.
PEI kinship data and research priorities
Read PEI kinship data and research prioritiesPEI Kinship Support Navigation
See how Guided Help, human navigation assistance and warm referrals can also reveal recurring service barriers when patterns are tracked responsibly.
See how navigation worksTurn research into a clearer picture of kinship care in PEI.
Grandfamilies & Kinship Care in PEI: The Facts
A concise briefing that separates what we can document from what PEI still does not count consistently.
Open the facts pageWhat Would a Kin-Friendly PEI Look Like?
A constructive framework for translating lived experience and research into better system practice.
Read the frameworkResearch and impact overview updated September 2026.
Grandfamilies are not a small or theoretical family form
Statistics Canada reported that in the 2021 Census, 36,860 children aged 0 to 14 lived with one or more grandparents and no parent in the household. That count does not capture every child being raised by aunts, uncles, siblings, family friends or other kinship caregivers.
Statistics Canada: children living with grandparents, 2021 Census
Research has been part of Building GRAND-Families from the beginning
The organization has worked with researchers and national family organizations to document lived experience, identify service gaps and translate what families say into practical support and public education.
It Takes a Village to Raise a Grandchild
A two-year qualitative research project brought together UPEI nursing researchers, Building GRAND-Families and national family-research partners. The published study drew on conversational interviews with 12 grandparents raising grandchildren in rural PEI.
The findings highlighted the challenges families face when health care and other systems do not fully recognize the uniqueness of grandfamily life.
Read the peer-reviewed Journal of Family Nursing articleStories of Grand-Families in Prince Edward Island
Founder Don Avery and Gaby Novoa contributed a chapter to Families, Mobility, and Work, published by Memorial University Press in 2022. The chapter explored the formation of grandfamilies, work mobility and the effort to organize stronger supports on PEI.
Read the Vanier Institute summaryA $295,000, three-year mental well-being project expanded the work.
Optimizing Mental Health and Well-Being in Grand-Families on PEI
The PEI Alliance for Mental Well-Being awarded Building GRAND-Families $295,000 over three years for a project designed to increase public understanding, strengthen capacity to support grandfamilies, build professional and family competencies, and create a peer-support community and wider network of support.
View the PEI Alliance grantee listingThe project model
- Research: understand family strengths, barriers and service gaps.
- Education: build knowledge for caregivers, professionals and the public.
- Community building: reduce isolation and strengthen the network around families.
The same barriers appear across research, support groups and program work.
Recognition
Families can be forced to explain repeatedly why a grandparent or relative is acting as the child's parent.
Legal authority
Custody, guardianship, consent and travel questions can become major practical barriers.
Financial pressure
Caregivers can take on food, clothing, transportation, child care and health costs at a stage of life when income may be fixed.
Mental health
Children may arrive following trauma or major disruption, while caregivers manage grief, stress and secondary trauma of their own.
Service navigation
Families often have to deal with child protection, benefits, schools, health care, legal services and community programs at the same time.
Isolation
Peer support matters because kinship caregivers can feel invisible within systems designed around parents or formal foster care.
Research only matters if it changes what happens next.
Family experience documented
Research and lived experience made the realities of grandfamilies visible in PEI and national family research.
Education developed
Caregiver workshops, educator resources and professional learning translated research into practical understanding.
Programs and navigation put evidence into practice
Family camps, counselling, peer support, equine-assisted learning and kinship support navigation create practical ways to respond to needs identified by families.
Advocacy continues
The organization continues bringing caregiver concerns into discussions about financial support, legal authority, child welfare, mental health and service design.
Impact and annual highlights
See our public program milestones and evaluation highlights, including what we learned from the 2026 family camp.
View impact highlightsPrinciples for responsible research partnerships
- Include caregiver lived experience before the project design is finished.
- Protect the privacy of children and families.
- Return useful findings to the community, not only academic audiences.
- Avoid treating caregivers only as research subjects when they can be partners.
- Connect findings to practical services, education or policy wherever possible.